Doodling on your phone

DRAWING
on your phone, Pocket PC or Palm

Doodle on a handheld touch screen and the world is your studio

Freedom at last from the stress of being bound to your desk! On a phone or other handheld screen you can draw where you please. Bed, beach, bus, train, plane. Anywhere but the bath.

Even with a Wacom graphics tablet, you're drawing on a pad at the side of a desktop machine. Like using a mouse, 'side-plate drawing' quickly becomes second nature, but the tablet is still a displacement.

On a touch screen phone or PDA you draw directly on the screen. Even the largest cellphone or handheld computer weighs next to nothing, and unlike a Tablet PC, will slip in your pocket to go anywhere.

DRAWING ON YOUR PHONE

There are now quite a few touch-screen phones. The iPhone is of course the latest. As I'm writing in the UK, I haven't had a chance to try the iPhone yet, but that might be more like finger painting! Meanwhile you can draw on the Palm Treo. Several smartphones have drawing facilities. Sony Ericsson's P series, including my P990i and one or two Nokia phones have touch screen and stylus.

With many Nokia phones, you can use a Digital Pen as an optional mobile accessory. Here, however, drawing is a two-stage procedure. You don't actually draw on the phone screen, but on special digital paper. Not worth it really.

Of course, if you don't have a touch screen phone, you can always draw on a scrap of ordinary paper and take a photo of your art if the phone has a camera. Or scan the result in later. This, too, is a two-stage procedure. (White paper usually turns out grey, since the camera usually takes the average of light from a whole scene as mid-grey, but you can always brighten and increase the contrast later.)

Sony Ericsson provided a 'drawing' programme with older phones like the T68i and T610, but this was little more than a gimmick and painful to use, as you had to move the cursor with the joystick.

I have to admit that doodling on a scrap of paper and simply taking a photo of the result it my favourite procedure, especially if your camera phone has a macro setting. My P990 takes remarkably good closeups.

If do you want to draw on your phone, just make sure you have a high resolution screen.

For instance, drawing on the Palm Treo 600 is not recommended. The coarse grained 160 x 160 pixel screen makes drawings impossibly blocky. If you want to draw on a Treo, pick the Treo 650 with 320 x 320 pixels. (Don't get the Treo 700w and expect it to go better still. For some strange reason, the Treo 700w has reverted to a 160 x 160 screen.)

Another tip. Get yourself a screen protector before you start to scribble.

My current digital drawing pad is my Sony Ericsson P990i. You can doodle in the notepad, but the tools are limited. Try drawing in the photo editor instead. You can take a photo of something neutral like a blank wall, then draw with the photo as your canvas.

DRAWING IN PALM NOTEPAD

The mobile phone message picture below was drawn quite a while ago in Palm Note Pad on a Palm Tungsten T .

No add-on Palm drawing software was required. Note Pad is part of the Palm. The message picture was doodled in Note Pad, tidied up, and converted to a wbmp file for WAP 2 phones in Photoshop.

That's another advantage of a small handheld screen,
whether on a pda or a mobile phone.
You can turn it sideways without the aid of a forklift!

Palm Note Pad drawings are regularly synchronised to the desktop. The desktop version of Note Pad allows you to paste your drawings into a paint or photo editor, or even into Word or Excel. Here's a preliminary Note Pad sketch for the message picture above, as it was copied into Word.

Palm Note Pad drawings are bitmaps, which means they can't be edited with the drawing tools in Word. However, you can do what you like with your Note Pad drawings in Photoshop Elements or another art editor.

DRAWING IN POCKET NOTES

Palm Note Pad's counterpart on the Pocket PC, called Pocket Notes, makes vector drawings, which are quite different.

Like its Palm cousin, Pocket Notes comes free with the gadget. Notes is limited to black and white, but you can colour and otherwise alter its vector creations in Pocket Word. After a fashion. Don't rely on their remaining as intended. Palm Note Pad bitmaps may do fewer acrobatics, but at least they're predictable. The purple owl below began to go unexpectedy bald after synchronising with the desktop.

If you have a Pocket PC - PLAY THE FACE GAME and learn about vector drawing!

How does a pocket pc know when you're writing and when you're drawing?

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How do you doodle on your phone or pda?

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