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Handspring To Release 65k Color Visor
Fervent writes: "Hoping to up-end Palm company's supremacy in the color department for Palm OS, Handspring plans to release a Palm device with support for 65,536 colors. " Also, they're gonna offer a version integrated with a cell phone.
I use a Visor but I agree with you. I personally prefer the Palm V look. Nice & sleek & futuristic - as you say, futuristic. I do some Palm development at work so I talked my boss into buying a variety of different ones - you know, for testing, yeah that's the ticket. Unfortunately, this was before the IIIc came out :(. I used the V for a couple of weeks and then the Visor came in. The 8MB flash module won out over aesthetics and now my boss has the V. I do miss the look and size of the V tho.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Pine vs. something like Outlook Express: it's very functional
;)
Having to suffer Outlook Express @ work and it's damnable inability to accept email address lists copied (point/right-click,etc) from pine, unix mail, netscape mail, etc. I'd favor whomever isn't trying to foist unnecessary new standars on me. I'll probably hold out for a linux palm then I can run whatever I damn well please.
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
While i have a couple of games on my Palm, the controls are HORRIBLE. Why palm didn't put an old-NES-style 4-way rocker on one side of the unit always baffled me. At the very least, they could have arranged 4 buttons in a diamond pattern so that reasonable directional control was possible! (the middle up/down thing and the two buttons near it are too far apart, and you have to switch your hands back and forth to use the outside two buttons.)
So... is visor going to give us better controls since its going to be marketed as a gaming machine? If so... bye bye Palm!!
include a rechargable Li-Ion battery (charges in 90 minutes)
Discharges in how many minutes? These colour displays suck power.
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
>Personally, I'd rather keep my cell phone
>out of my Pilot and vice-versa.
nah. They problem is that we're reaching the ergonomic limit of cell phones, while manufacturers keep pushing to make them smaller.... Result? i can only dial using my finger nail because the buttons are so @#*&^@#*$ small i can't push normally and not hit 2 or 3. Cell phones can't get much smaller and be useful, so start putting more functionality in the case. I've been wondering how long it would take somebody to combine one with a good PDA....
Personally, I'm waiting for Samsungs one coming out this fall that's an MP3 player too... now THAT's useful.....
j
It probably wouldn't work, but, hey.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The solution, IMHO, would be a small enough cell-phone with a built-in modem you can hook up to your PDA over IR (no extra cables). My favorites in this area are the Nokia 89xx series, particularly the 8990. I just got my V, and I am lusting after the 8990 now (costs almost as much :-(...
The things I really hate about Wince are how fast they go obsolete, and lack of compatibility between units.
I have an old 1st generation wince device, and it went obsolete like 4 months after I got it. A coworker bought a Cassiopeia a few months ago and within two months MS had released a new, incompatible OS...
The device incompatibility is pretty impressive too, since wince devices can be based on a number of processors.
What? There's no version of "JoeBob's Pr0n Viewer CE 3.14" for your MIPS wince2 device? Sorry!
True, the wince hardware is far more advanced than Palm, but IMHO, the overall usability sucks. Palm is so much more elegant.
(And the Palm dev kit is free, which beats the hell out of ~$600 for Visual Studio and the Wince dev kit...)
--K
---
I know this was meant as a joke, but reality is already way ahead of you.
You can get a Minstrel/Omnisky for a current-model Palm and use VNC to remotely-control X and Windows desktops. It's been doable for more than a year now. Granted, since the Minstrel is slow, it would be slow as all hell, but it would work. Snap something faster onto the Palm/Visor's RS-232 port, and it becomes less slow. Though panning around on a 160x160 screen may not be your idea of fun.
On the other hand, the SSH and TN5250 emulators I've used to connect to AS/400s wirelessly with a Palm work like a charm.
I did. They have none of the above information, at least not findable within 10-15 minutes.
Thou shalt not tell others to RTFM without having RTFM thyself.
I have a few rebukes to this move. This doesn't shake-up or improve the Palm platform at all. Number one, there are almost no apps available for Palm OS that even use color to begin with. Second, the Dragonball, even at 30MHz, does not have the computing power to take advantage of 65,000 colors. Also, considering the standard resolution of the Palm, you cannot even display half that many colors (approximately 26,000 pixels - I forget the exact dimentions). Being that most apps would use repeated colors for various window widgets and so forth, this increase in colordepth would show no improvement in useablility - and since games typically show a limited number of colors on the display at any one time, why bother? It's a step in the wrong direction. Why not focus on making them smaller (Handsprings are still bigger than my Palm Vx) and cheaper (it still costs the same as my PalmVx did nearly 4 months ago) instead of adding as of yet unneeded features (because if people want something that 'looks' like their PC desktop, they'll probably buy a WinCE device - the rest of us use Palms for pure, serious functionality - not pretty graphics).
Include wireless networking and an X Windows server. Then I can run all my apps from anywhere in the house. Do that and they kick Palm out of the market!!
Yeah! What a great idea! Go after the 0.001% of the market that would want to do remote X display, and increase costs for the other 99.999% of the market that doesn't know what an X server is (or why the "X server" runs on the "client" machine and the "X clients" run on the "server" machine :^) ).
Please, people, don't disrupt my wishful thinking with nitpicky little points like "reality." Thank you.
Oh. Sorry. Never mind, then.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Integrating a cell phone and a PDA like this is really not a good idea. Many people get info through their cellphone and put it directly into their PDA (meetings, schedules, notes, quick calculations).
This would be easier if both devices were connected. Doing it via the Visor's Springboard slot seems like as good a way to accomplish this as any other.
How are you going to hear someone on the phone and enter data when you have to keep the PDA on your
ear?
Just use an earpiece. The Visor already has a built-in microphone, so all the cell phone module would have to add is the earpiece.
The best solution I can think of is to have a hands-free, but even then you will have a cord to get tangled up in. The cellphone software and OS also have to support thredding/multitasking so you can use other PDA apps (calendar, etc.) while the cellphone conversation is uninterrupted.
The module would plug into the Visor's expansion slot, so the cell phone circuitry would be separate from the PDA itself. The PDA apps (primarily the addressbook) would merely have to tell the cell phone which number to dial and display any data that the module sent back. These apps could be pre-loaded on the Visor itself or more likely, be installed on the cell phone module and launched automatically when it is inserted into the Visor's Springboard slot. The Springboard slot is set up so that expansion modules can do this easily and transparently.
Does this
From my experience:
-When the cost of TFT screens drop (remember it is a $150 device).
-When batteries are able to hold more energy (more pixels == higher power requirements== increase battery drain).
-When people start demanding wireless X displays!!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
it makes things less contrasty for reading in extreme lighting situations, and if it's anything like the Palm 3c's color, it's quite painful to look at for more than, say, 3 seconds.
That's funny, I have nothing but raves regarding the paperwhite screen, high brightness, and non-gimmicky addition of color to OS widgets. Plus, AvantGo works well with TheRegister, though I'd like to figure a way to point AG thru my junkbuster proxy..
Integrating it with the cell phone would be bad.
Definitely. I want a 3G/4G unit with a little video camera and 2-10mbps wireless so I can have a handheld videophone. Anything less than that is a waste of time.. Though integrated wireless IP that is _useful_ (that is, allows me to buy movie tickets in the USA, which no US (W|CR)AP site has been able to do on my SPCS) would be nice, it's not enough to get me to buy a new phone/PDA..
Your Working Boy,
Absolutely! The move to 65K colors seems kind of dumb to me at this point in time. The screen only has 25,600 pixels on it. So even if you used one unique color for each pixel on screen you would have 39,936 colors left unused. Since most normal artwork doesn't use 1 discreet color for each pixel, the color space for this device will be massively underutilized until such a time as the resolution of the screen increases.
Why it is that geeks can't see behind the curtain for things like this continues to befuddle me.
It's a simple matter of business economy, and careful planning.
It costs Palm about another 30% more to make the magalloy Palm V than it did for them to make the earlier plastic-shell Palms. There are some that say that the only reason magalloy was possible with the Palm V line was because of strategic partnerships made with companies such as IBM, who have sufficient weight to pull this off, economically.
Because the manufacturing costs are higher, and Handspring is still a relatively young company trying very hard to capture market share (and thus, they put more into marketing expenses than the the extremely expensive tool-up required for manufacturing magalloy cases), it makes total sense that they're using the injection-mold plastic cases for the existing Visor line.
This plastic also has physical limitations such as strength, flexibility, etc. that have to be accounted for in design - and thus, the case is designed the way it is. I personally don't find it terribly unattractive - certainly, it fits well in my pocket, follows the 'bar of soap' design philosophy for personal consumer electronics devices, and it functions well.
Tooling up a custom manufacturing plant to produce magnesium-alloy cases which can thus be smaller and thinner (due to increased strengths) is not something that I would expect a new company such as Handspring to do, not at all.
They are doing exactly what they need to do, which is produce good quality devices, at an affordable price, which captures market share and creates happy, satisfied consumers, while also reducing the investment in expensive manufacturing toolup processes.
Give them a year, and I would say that they'll release smaller, thinner, more fashionable-looking versions of the Visor - because by then they'll have the capital to invest in the tooling facilities for new case materials, and they'll also have the market share to warrant the investment.
I know for sure that, as a loyal, happy Visor user (been a Palm user since Day One of the PalmPilot track) I will be more than happy to upgrade to a magalloy Visor next year some time, because I trust this company...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Include wireless networking and an X Windows server. Then I can run all my apps from anywhere in the house. Do that and they kick Palm out of the market!!
Please, people, don't disrupt my wishful thinking with nitpicky little points like "reality." Thank you.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
_Finally_, portable pornography that doesn't rely on MS software. Geeks rejoice!
I don't know why they can't put the reoslution up to 320x320 and make it fall back to 160x160 for old apps using a 2x2 pixel group for each pixel.
Perhaps even those old applications would only see 160x160 resolution, but the fonts, buttons, etc. would all have sharper edges unbeknownst to the application?
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
If that is the case, then perhaps Handspring extended PalmOS3.5 to 3.5h (like they did for 3.1) to support the 16-bit color.
If that is true, why couldn't they also extend it to support higher resolutions? None of the articles has said one way or the other what resolution the new devices will be.
They're winning because they keep it simple, and because the entry-level price is so much lower.
Most people want to use a handheld for very simple things...a phone book, an address book, maybe a few small games to pass the time during meetings. They don't want an MP3 player with just enough space to hold one song, or other such things that really only appeal to those who like to show off.
One of my coworkers is a big WinCE fan...he's gone through several ones that he's bought, sold, or traded. The other day he decided to play an MP3 through the little internal speaker. It sounded like crap. He said, "Can't do that with your Visor, can you?"
Of course, I can't, but then again, I paid less than half the price. And since mine is actually small enough to be comfortably clipped on the belt, I get a lot more work done with it. His is on his desk half the time because he doesn't feel like carrying it around all the time.
I don't need a "real" pc with me at all times. I have a workstation at my desk, multiple boxes at home, and a laptop for the rare occurances when I need that sort of capability away from those places. For everything else, PalmOS works great.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
I was wondering why Sony's Clie sports a jog dial....
Silly me, I didn't think of the game issue.
I have a few rebukes to this move. This doesn't shake-up or improve the Palm platform at all. Number one, there are almost no apps available for Palm OS that even use color to begin with.
A quick search at Palmgear turns up 558 color apps for the PalmOS. That may be a small fraction of Palmgear's 6600+ software library but it's nothing to sneeze at.
Second, the Dragonball, even at 30MHz, does not have the computing power to take advantage of 65,000 colors.
Then they can use specialized video circuitry to help it out. Maybe that's why it's so expensive.
Also, considering the standard resolution of the Palm, you cannot even display half that many colors (approximately 26,000 pixels - I forget the exact dimentions).
25,600 to be exact. He shoots, he scores!
Being that most apps would use repeated colors for various window widgets and so forth, this increase in color depth would show no improvement in useablility - and since games typically show a limited number of colors on the display at any one time, why bother?
It could make fonts and maps more readable and allow for sharper undithered images for your Eyemodule pictures.
It's a step in the wrong direction. Why not focus on making them smaller (Handsprings are still bigger than my Palm Vx)
Part of the problem with making the Handspring Visor smaller is that the its Springboard slot takes up a lot of space that cannot be used to cram more electronics. Expandability for size, it's a trade-off not everyone can live with but some of can.
and cheaper (it still costs the same as my PalmVx did nearly 4 months ago)
This would be the first Visor to even come close to the V series in price. The earlier Visors sell for just $149-$249.
instead of adding as of yet unneeded features (because if people want something that 'looks' like their PC desktop, they'll probably buy a WinCE device
But if I bought a WinCE device, I'd have to through away my Flash Module and all my PalmOS apps! With a color Visor I get it all. The apps, the functionality, expandability, and color games, pictures, and maps. I'm not saying I'm going to run out and buy a color Visor as soon as it becomes available -- but it sure is tempting!
Does this
Insightful?
The move in computer graphics adapters to 16,777,216 colors seems kind of dumb to me at this point in time. The typical screen (1024x768) has only 786,432 pixels on it. (Even a "high-resolution" screen -- 2048x1536 -- has only 3,145,728 pixels on it.)
So even if you used one unique color for each pixel on screen you would still have 15,990,784 colors left unused. Since most normal artwork doesn't use one discrete color for each pixel, the color space for this device will be massively underutilized until such a time as the resolution of the screen increases.
--
begin 644
...we called 65,536 "64k" rather than "65k."
sweet phone. Too bad WAP is so sucky.
It has nothing to do with being able to see all of the colors "at one time".
16 bit colour is worth having because it means your applications don't have to worry about working with only 256 colours at one time. They can simply work with the global 16 bit palette, and everything is much easier. So, if you display a photograph, you don't have to dither or quantize the image, or steal colors from other areas of the screen.
16 bit is probably the upper useful bound on portables though. The jump from 16 to 24 bit is often hard to distinguish even on a high quality desktop monitor.
(BTW, Is the IIIc a paletted 8 bit display a la VGA, or do you simply have a fixed set of 256 colours?)
More resolution is always nice, but the colour screen has it's own potential to improve plain text output, if it uses some sort of sub-pixel font rendering.
This News.com article has quite a bit more information on the VisorPhone, including a picture.
Unfortunately it's just a kernel and a few (mostly useless) programs (like lissajous).
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
First of all, it will be 64k color (16-bit color) versus Palm's 8-bit color. Still, the screen is expected to remain 160x160 resolution (due to PalmOS limitations) which means, at best, you could display about 1/3 of the 64k colors on the screen at once anyways.
The new units will also include a rechargable Li-Ion battery (charges in 90 minutes), 30MHz Dragonball CPU (they used to be 16-20MHz), PalmOS 3.5 (for official color and greyscale support, IR syncing, network syncing, etc.).
Unfortunately, the unit will also be a tad thicker, and come with a hefty $449 pricetag.
As for the cell unit, I was under the impression it was a SprignBoard that would work in any Visor, not a different Visor model. After all, that's Handpsring's differentiator.
As one of them, I can say that we've been waiting for some inklink of Palm OS 3.5 capabilities for a while now (for official color and greyscale support, IR syncing, network syncing, etc.)
However, we don't have Flash RAM, so any OS upgrade would have to be in RAM (no big deal if its small enough), or on a SpringBoard.
Either that, or we have to foot the bill for a $200+ upgrade after sellng our existing Visors.
When are we going to see more than a 160x160 resolution in these devices instead of more color? I'd rather be able to see more text(with decent font detail) than more colors. I know it's a step closer to being more of a laptop than a palmtop, but still.
Oh yeah, it can run Linux and X :)
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I can not believe it would take until November 2000 before we could have a GSM enabled PDA
Ever heard of Nokia's Communicator (the 9110i), or of Kyocera's PDQ (not GSM, but almost)?. Cool stuff, but you have to lug a real brick of a cellphone even if you don't want (or need) to use the PDA stuff.
That's why I stick to having a Palm IIIx and a Nokia 8210.
Now, I'm not sure I'd go for the "all-in-one". I mean, what happens if you lose or break your GSM/PDA/Kitch-sink-mega-gizmo? Never keep all your eggs in the same basket, huh.
Btw (and slghtly OT), the 9110 has a pretty powerful speaker, so you can use a wav file as a ringtone. Just for fun, a friend had put an old phone (ring-ring) sound, you should have seen the faces in the bus when the thing would ring... LOL!
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Where are they going to put the batteries it takes to run this beastie for more than 2 hours?
got diehard?
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought I recalled Palm OS only supporting up to 256 colors. Anyone?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Mame has been ported to the PocketPC. Check it out.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I happen to have just purchased a Visor Deluxe two weeks ago. That leaves me another two weeks on my 30-day money back guarantee. Therefore, I wish to know: should I sync this thing one last time, toss it back to Handspring, suffer one more PDAless month, and end up with the bestest new technology?
I don't want color --- it drains power. A monochrome screen is fine by me. What I want to know about are this new processor and the new OS. What does PalmOS 3.5 give me? How fast is the existing Visor processor?
The two biggest selling points for the Visor over the palm have been the price and the springboard slot. Well, this new color is apparently priced at $450, which is back up in the range of the Palm IIIc. And the accompanying story that I saw talks about the long awaited cellphone module...which will cost about $300! I thought one of the early things that Handspring said was they were going after the more "everyday" market, not the corporate expense accounts.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Personally, I'd rather keep my cell phone out of my Pilot and vice-versa. I use my cell phone _constantly_ and it goes with me everywhere. Thus, I appreciate the tiny amount of cubic volume my Motorola v8160 utilizes. My Palm VII is with me almost as much, but in all honesty I don't need it 1/2 as much as my phone. I'd hate to carry around something as large as the Palm all the time. It seems that any decent PDA needs a decent amount of screen area, so once integrated with a phone, the unit can only get _so_ small and still be useful. What we need is flexible/foldable LCD screens to be affordable. Then my phone could be "unfolded" to reveal a respecably sized screen...
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