Microsoft Windows Phone 7 will feature WVGA, HVGA resolutions

Since its showing at Mobile World Congress 2010 last month, there has been a lot of buzz about the interface design of the Windows Phone 7 OS.

Now there's some news about the actual displays on future mobile devices equipped with the unreleased mobile operating system, and it's pretty exciting.

According to Microsoft’s Shawn Hargreaves, all of the first phones released with WP7 will initially support a WVGA display (480 × 800 resolution). Later on, Microsoft will tack on HVGA support (320 × 480 resolution) in a subsequent update.

That should be a great resolution for Internet browsing and photos, but Hargreaves concedes it won't be so pretty for anyone interested in doing some 3D gaming on their WP7 device. Thus, the devices will all be built with special hardware dedicated to image scaling so that game developers can write games with a lower-resolution that can be rescaled, all without eating up the GPU.

Hopefully that won't be necessary on WP7 devices further down the road, but we'll just have to wait. At least we won't have to wait as long for Windows Phone 7 as it will be out sometime this holiday season.