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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.
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!!
>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
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.
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.
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."
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?)
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.