Recently, I described my experience of transitioning from a line of Nokia phones to the Nexus One.  One thing that I tried initially, and failed at, was to create some custom wallpaper.  I think I've figured it out, although through a hacky sort of solution.

The Nexus One has a display size of 800x480 (HxW) pixels.  This resolution is fairly high for a device of its size, which is good, considering its strange two subpixel PenTile display.  The wallpaper on Android is usually quite a bit larger than the single display, since the wallpaper scrolls left & right as the user scrolls between different screens.  According to specifications, the wallpaper for the N1 should be 960x800.

I created some wallpaper with 960x800 dimensions, and tried it out.  However, Android kept prompting me to select a subset of the image and display that as wallpaper (ie, cropping).  I tried this out, and got a slightly resampled image, which looked terrible.  Wanting wallpaper that wasn't resized on the phone, I looked around, and learned that it's necessary to create an image with larger dimensions than either the screen or wallpaper specifications indicate.

After trying a few things, it turns out that an image of 1600x1200 with actual centered 960x800 content is the sweet spot.  Let me illustrate:

I took the beautiful Funchal Bay scene by Ruben Freitas and resize & cropped it to 960x800.  Then I expanded the canvas to 1600x1200, while keeping the original image intact.  When uploaded to the phone, the crop box by default encompassed the original 960x800 image exactly.

I'm sure there's a better way of doing this, but this works for me!

Also, happy Independence Day!

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