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74:68:69:73:20:69:73:20:68:65:78

Understand that?  Didn’t think so.  Basically what the above statement just says “this is hex” in a format known as hex or hexadecimal.  Now this format is very useful in computers because, being a Base-16 mathematics system, it can reduce power-of-two mathematics systems such as binary (which is Base-2) into very short strings.  However, that’s another story, what matters is that you probably didn’t understand that first off.

Maybe you’re a bit more technically oriented and you can transcode that to ASCII and understand it, or maybe not.  Maybe it just confuses the utter crap out of you.  Well a computer is in exactly the same boat.

The point of this article as I’m going to expose is what exactly a driver is, why the drivers for the Tilt are important, and why you should or should not be concerned.  Continued after the break.

But what does not understanding the hex statement have to do with the drivers?  Well we’re going to get into some computing terminology so I’ll try and make this as simple as possible.

The point of a driver, specifically the graphics driver on the Tilt, is to allow the software that you run on your Tilt, to communicate with the graphics hardware within your Tilt.  Without those drivers, it’s essentially just like spouting hex code at you.

Ok so I’m being a little dramatic there.  Windows Mobile (and most OSs for that matter) does include a form of driver to allow basic communication between the graphics subsystem, otherwise it could not function like we know it.  However, this basic communication does not include any/much hardware acceleration.  It provides basic methods of graphics but is mostly software based, which is much slower than hardware methods (hence why we call it hardware acceleration).

Think of it this way.  Say you have no idea how to speak Afrikaans (language spoken in South Africa).  If you’re going there, you’ll end up needing to know the language a bit for those who don’t speak English.  Well it’s obviously going to be much faster and more accurate if you hire an interpreter (the driver) to help you communicate than a little guide with 100 most referenced phrases (basic functionality) in the airport.

So that’s what a driver is, what does the driver actually do in the Tilt?

Well, I’ve been kind of explaining, but like I said, the graphics driver allows the software on your phone to interact with the hardware so you can accelerate your graphical interactions.  Yeah that’s pretty much it.  It doesn’t necessarily add much/any additional functionality, it just speeds things up.  Granted I believe that the drivers enable Direct3D and OpenGL/ES support (graphical languages, makes it easier for programmers to write software with 2D/3D content, particularly the latter), you may not see too much additional features that will be enabled.

But it is the speed issue.  Maybe your Tilt is fast enough for your purposes, but some of us believe that our devices should make usage of the hardware that’s within it so there’s not a bunch of “dead weight”.  What’s the point of having hardware that’s not used?

So that’s really it.  Drivers speed the device up.  Well kind of.  The programs that will experience the speed increase are those specifically written to take advantage of the APIs that are offered through the hardware, meaning that only certain programs will experience a speed increase.  These programs will include games obviously, probably HTC Cube, video playback, and the graphics interface should speed up a bit too (I’m just guessing here though, you may experience more/less software speed increases).

And to even further burst your bubble, the drivers that were released recently, only are 3D drivers (not 2D) and only affect non-fullscreen applications, which is not too many.

So now that I’ve completely whittled you down (hopefully), why be excited?  BECAUSE PROGRESS IS BEING MADE!  THAT’S WHY!  It’s always exciting to see the base of your house being poured or the boss talking to someone at work.  It’s not a solution, but at least progress is being made, that’s why everyone is so excited.

Right now the drivers are in alpha stage most likely.  Now that they are released, things will likely move fairly rapidly.  The guys over at XDA and Tilt/TyTN II users around the globe will contribute to debugging and maybe even doing some programming and bugfixing.  Now that they’re released, things should move a lot faster, hopefully.

I hope I’ve at least muddied up the water a little bit for you, maybe given you more or less reason to be excited.  I’ll hopefully be doing a series on Tilt Internals explaining a lot more about the Tilt.  Stay tuned to TiltSite for more information.

External links:
Wikipedia on Device Drivers
HTC Class Action Device Driver page
XDA-Developers Driver discussion

Tyler (30 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook