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Palm Ships With 12-bit Screen, Says 16-Bit On Box
Launch was among the many readers to point out that "Palm recently announced that they made a mistake in their product description of the m130... it doesn't have the 16-bit screen they advertised. Rather then admit the mistake, Palm is using every ounce of their spinning power to mislead its less tech-savy customers into believing that the palm m130 can display 58,621 'color combinations' rather then the 'more than 65,000 colors' it had previously stated; only a 11% difference. This tricky language is meant to shade the fact that a 12-bit screen can only display 4,096 colors... that's a 93% difference." Have they not learned from the mistakes of history? On the other hand, the screen resolution is 160x160 pixels.
There are plenty of geeks out there who would love to own a PDA with 4096 colors! That's the number of colors the Amiga could display. Think of the nostalgia value!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Woho, finaly you can play nethack in colors!
They should follow in HP's footsteps with a full refund. Then, maybe their customers can use the money to get a cool (and more honestly advertised) PDA like a Handspring or a Sony. Just my 2 cents.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
640 colours ought to be enough for everyone...
It's disgusting to see the marketing spinners at work again... but what's even more disusting is that it will work. Watch and see - most people are too busy to care about the difference between 'colours' and 'colour combinations', and without a strong counter-spin from a competitor I am certain they will get away with this one.
Ok, so Palm should just refund the 4 bits to everyone who bought the m130. Hell, it's only 50 cents, what's the big deal? :)
A company that actually cared about customer satisfaction would immediately offer to allow customers to return their PDAs, and a repackaging of unsold units to reflect the actual capabilities of the product. Though a recall would be expensive and likely require a product redesign, such an offer would likely be cost-effective and give consumers a reason to feel positively about the company.
Since most people probably saw the PDAs before they bought them, they must have been satisfied enough with the appearance of the display at the time of purchase. It would therefore be unlikely that a specification change would convince them to return the PDA and lose any data that they stored on it.
Why is it so difficult for companies to do the right thing, even if it will cultivate a more positive image for them in the long run, at a limited expense?
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
This should explain that. From Wired:
The m130 actually supports 4,096 colors typical of a 12-bit screen. But by using blending techniques, the company can display 58,621 "color combinations -- approximately 11 percent fewer color combinations than we had originally believed" on the m130 handheld, said Palm spokeswoman Marlene Somsak.
an old Steven Wright joke that went something like...
I went to the 24 hour store and the clerk was closing up.
"I thought you were open 24 hours."
"Not in a row."
Thats just 4 bits man, and so much hue and cry.. people have run away with millions of dollars, sure cant we let palm dearie to have 4 itsy bitsy teeny weeny bits? ;-)
And if you want colours GeForce is always there
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Calling Mr. Muris! Mr. Muris? Are you there?
I do believe reading a quote from Tim where he said that the FTC will not tolerate companies not living up to their promises and misrepresenting their products.
I'll be very curious to learn if we get any FTC action on this.
.sig - Would not a Microsoft employee, by any other name, smell the same?
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Apparently this debate has been going on a long time... Palm info center has a good article about it... And the PIC forum where the debate first broke.
Your mammas flamebait.
I sure hope red is one of those 4096 colours ...
"Old man yells at systemd"
Not that you could actually tell the difference in number of colors... I'd think 4,096 is probably sufficient, unless you have to view something with 200 shades of pink, which really threw my digital camera. I had some sort of chunks of pink, from photographing a hot-pink Fender HM-Strat, looked really bizarre, but some dithering would have been acceptable.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I belive that for the user experience the difference must be just a few percents - especially on a palm device with a limited resolution and screen size. Ofcourse, the coolness factor can decrease by 99%, but that does not matter in reality.
I bet no one would have gone looking for the 5000 missing colours... :P
My girlfriend always tells me that size doesn't matter...
where is your girlfriend, and where may i hit on her.
Does anyone have an idea how many color combinations can be shown on a real 16-bit display? That would be an interesting comparison with the PR-talk from Palm!
It's a shame that Slashdot linked to an article about the Jornada's problem that didn't mention HP's awesome response: Offering a full refund to anyone who bought one. Palm is coming nowhere close to this.
- Steve
No seriously, why would anyone buy PDAs with the likes of the Nokia and Ericsson PDA/Mobiles hitting the market ? Less functionality, less stable OS, all around its not as good a product.
So sure they've lied about the colours, but then they have to or it doesn't stand out _at all_ amoung similar products with better functionality and PDA/Phones that wipe the floor with it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
before I was darn positive I could be playing the new Doom 3 on it and bask in the sheer beauty. Now I have so few colors that I'm not even sure it is still truly color.
I wonder if my e-mails and phone numbers will even work with the fewer colors?
probably not.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
In all truth, can anyone beyond hardcore geeks tell the difference in you desktop when you swap from 16 bit color to 32-bit color? the difference there is a few million colors, so what with the big deal with a loss of 61,000?
even with 4K colors, you can accuratly display any photo on your PDA with minimal loss of quality.
Excellent example, the color books at Sherwin Williams, you really think that have over 4000 different colors in that book, and most of those almost look that same as another color.
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
...and be incredibly frustrated by the great hardware married with crap firmware and software.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
And, yeah, I do have a Palm M130. My partner recently bought a re-con Handspring at Fry's and I was amazed at the qualitative difference of the tro screens .... *grr*
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I wonder if those blending techniques amount to bleed from one pixel to another, and it's actually poor quality and the user's eyes that are doing the blending.
I imagine those SAME blending techniques would yield 65536 x 65536 colors in 16-bits, and so they are actually significantly more than 99% off the specification.
ok, graphics geeks... factor 58,621. You get 31 x 31 x 61. Looks like 5-bits, 5-bits, and 6-bits, blended. I'm wondering how they came up with that number of colors! Any ideas?
Why is everyone jumping on Palm about this? The Compaq iPAQ has a 12-bit screen and produces *ONLY* 4,096 colors. The m130, by contrast, produces *MORE* colors, using blending techniques.
1) 4096 colours is enough for something of that resolution. The Amiga500 displayed that many colours at higher resolutions and looked just fine (all considering).
2) Palms are not 19" raster blasters, nobody is going to notice
The only thing I can come up with is that it's 31*31*61. (Obviously not a coincidence)
16 bit color would be 32*32*64.
12 bit color would be 16*16*16.
When they refer to color combinations, they can't be possible color values for adjacent pixels - that would be a huge number.
Any ideas?
Where any of these devices sold in the uk?
In the UK the Trade Descriptions Act would make a deliberate false description of the device very illegal.
Even if the false description was a genuine error, customers would still be entitled to a refund.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
bought a palm pilot years ago, but never again. their os is outdated and haven't seen anything that's caught my eye since i don't know when. and now this! after reading the supposed appology, it seems obvious that they are just trying to hide what they did. i mean, the average joe will not understand it, which seems to be what they wanted. technically, they appologized, but about what!? not only for this, but i don't see myself buying a palm product again. too over-priced for what you are getting: aka ripoff.
Simple answer: They lied about their product.
Imagine you buy a PC which is advertised as having 512Mb of RAM. When you get it home, you find that the BIOS only reports 256Mb of RAM. Miffed, you call the company, who then explains that this is true, it does only have 256Mb of RAM, but using swap space, it'll really be just like having 512Mb of RAM. Except it will be more like 448Mb of RAM, because you can't have a 256Mb swap.
Are you saying you wouldn't be pissed?
My first thought is that on a 160x160 pixel screen, you can only ever possibly see 25,600 colors at a time because there are only 25,600 pixels total.
The resolution of the screen is 160x160 -- that's 25,600 pixels. How can 50,000+ colors be displayed in 25,600 pixels??
It's a shame that Slashdot linked to an article about the Jornada's problem that didn't mention HP's awesome response: Offering a full refund to anyone who bought one. Palm is coming nowhere close to this.
,still not post (with the message "you can not post to this page"), so send it to a computer on another side of the world to post from there!! wtf?!!)
You mean you wish the article mentioned something like AlexanderOgilvy also confirmed that H-P would refund the full purchase price of any dissatisfied Jornada 540 series Pocket PC buyer.?
I would probably *read* the article before criticising others for not having read it, but hey thats just me! (and to see the parent got modded up in the 3 mins it took me to judiciously apply my mod points in other threads so I could submit this, realise I still couldn't post even after modding not in this thread, copy the text onto another computer, load the browser, copy and paste,
On a related note, does "dithering" really count at all? I mean come on - theoretically a 256 colour device can "represent" a bazillion colours with enough dithering. Its how many *real* colours that should count IMHO.
I own a Palm device, actually an Handera 330. I've had one in some form for 5 years. I like my Palm. I want to keep buying palms, but I won't be able to.
</preface>
<rant>
As much as I hate to say it, it appears to be only a matter of time before Microsoft takes over the handheld arena. Palm, like Netscape before it, is not the suffering saint being crushed by the giant, but rather a bunch of incompetent fools. They have has 95% of the market in handhelds just a few years ago, and what have they done with it? Nothing! They issue late releases that tought minimal imrpovements and then pull stunts like this. If it were not for Sony and Handspring, I believe that Palm would already be gone. Please! Get your act in gear or leave the party.
</rant>
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
While I agree this is false advertising, I didn't notice the claims when I bought it - I actually turned one on and played with it so I knew what I was getting. Because of that, I guess I'm neither suprised nor really upset. From my point of view I can't see how 16 bit color would be noticably different on the very-low-res screen anyway. It is still a lot better than my IIIC was.
Clear, Dark Skies
Look at some of the Sony Clie handhelds out there, sleek cases, 320 x 320 screens, and (at least mine has) 16 bit color. Absolutely beautiful. Add in a mp3 player and they look quite attractive :)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
...and be incredibly frustrated by the great hardware married with crap firmware and software.
Or buy the Zaurus developer edition... and have only yourself to blame if the software is crappy =)
Get off my launchpad!
hey presto! three resolutions.
#3 makes me confused.
What if "back away VERY slowly" is an act of aggression in their culture?
well you have to draw the line somewhere. got any better suggestions?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Palm, Inc. Corporate Headquarters
400 N. McCarthy Blvd.
Milpitas, CA 95035
--
This is in reference to the "updated characterization of the Palm m130's color capabilities." I just wanted to let you know that your deliberate attempt to conceal the truth has convinced me that I will NEVER support Palm by buying one of its products. The knowledge base article claims that the difference between the advertised 16-bit display and the delivered 12-bit is 11%, and compares actual colors with "color combinations", using some crazy formula, to arrive at this figure. This is a blatant lie. A 12-bit screen can display only 4096 colors, a 93% difference. You are comparing apples to oranges for the sole purpose of deceiving customers who bought this product and abating anticipated complaints.
This bit of dishonesty is unacceptable and likely indicative of deeper lying dishonesty. Perhaps your marketing division would benefit from the honesty lessons that your financial division should have learned in the wake of the public attention brought to corporate dishonesty in fiscal reportings. I have no wish to deal with a company like yours. It is very clear that your customers are not your first priority, though whether you have made such claims I don't know.
I am a computer science major and tech enthusiast, who both buys many tech products myself and makes recommendations to friends and family who actively seek out my advice; many of them won't make such purchases without first getting my input. Be it known that not only will I not recommend your products, but will go out of my way to recommend against them.
Thanks for your time.
Of course, change it a bit so it makes sense for you.--
How about learning the difference between then and than?
Exactly my thoughts - I'd mod you up if I had the points. Why do people get so worked up about this? Perhaps if you were trying to look at a larger picture which scrolled around on the screen, this would be a problem, but I believe that for most uses it's fine as it is and you *can't* notice a difference.
creation science book
only a matter of time before Microsoft takes over the handheld arena.
I heard that in the late 1990's. Microsoft was comming out with a PDA. It was going to bury Apple's Newton.
The 1st attempt was 'windows for pen'. Apple's Netwon outlasted that. Palm came into existance and outlasted 'windows for pen'
Then I heard that Microsoft's PDA would have more features than the Newton. The Newton line was sporting quicktime, text to speech and speech to text in 1996-1997 timeframe. Only in the next CENTURY did Microsoft's platform catch up.
Windows for Pen - dead
Windows CE - dead
now its some other product. When will that be dead too?
Apple's Newton was killed off by Jobs, so that helped Microsoft.
Like 'death of UseNet', Microsoft taking over I'll belive it when I see it. Until they DO Take over, I can use Palm OS in a handspring and send data over the cell phone. And if palm/handspring goes tits up, I can pick the Sybian phone(s). If they die, someone will have a BSD or gnu/linux one. Only when I have no other realistic choice than an MS software based phone will I hold my nose and buy one.
You could get an IPaq and then be frustrated by both crap hardware and software.
Compaq did the exact same thing with the iPAQ when it first came out. They swore blue in the tooth (no pun intended) that it was a 16bit screen.
Flicker some pixel pairs for half the brightness and you've got all 58621. Cynical.
I love Australian consumer law, :)
your choice of the 3 R's..
repaire, refund or replace
it the device is faulty or dose
not match the specifications/
discription you where given even
over the phone
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Keep moving closer to the screen as you read this to confirm.
So yes, red is one of those colors.
yeah....
3. Drop trousers, turn through 180 degrees and touch your toes. If communication with aliens is established, advise that this is the standard human greeting procedure.
Wow, I am not surprised, Palm has been, in my experience, one of the crappiest companies in the world. They sold me a defective unit (the battery didn't work), and only after over a month of arguing to managers did they agree to replace it. I had just purchased the unit and they wanted to replace my *NEW* unit with a refurbished one and said they couldn't send me a new unit since I had opened the packaging. Umm, guys? It's your fault it didn't work! It wasn't until I threatened legal action, and to report them to the Better Business Bureau, that they decided they should play fair. What a bunch of corporate ass holes!
This latest stunt really surprises me, it would be like I sold you 4 apples for the price of 10, and when you objected I said "Ummm... but I can combine these four apples in seven different ways, so it's really like having 7 apples right?". I hope somebody files a class action lawsuit against their collective idiocy. People make mistakes and that is understandable, being an jerk and lying to cover up at your customers expense is not.
Is it 16, with 4 unused bits? That would make sense to me, and explain why it was originally labled 16 bit. If so, I don't know if customers should get angry about it, after all, we've had 24 bit color labeled as 32 bit for quite some time.
The comments on this topic are sort of nuts! Everyone who is defending Palm because you're a big fan of the company and see them as some poor little underdog who could never do anything wrong, please just read the article again, pretending Microsoft did this and give me your hypothetical reply to that.
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Well, if it is 12-bit color PLUS some funky "frame-rate control" and "dithering", they can claim 58k in an underhanded way.
The question is... can they control the frame-rate for each pixel individually, or only for the whole screen at a time? With dithering, you're relying on the adjacent pixel color to "fool" your eye into seeing a color that's not there. With only 160x160 pixels on the screen, the pixels are too coarse and too few to make that work effectively.
The real question is: how many colors can you display on the screen AT THE SAME TIME? Seeing as there's only 25,600 pixels, I'd expect they should be able to display 25,600 colors at the same time if they were going to make their claims above with a "clear conscience".
Then again, I'm in marketing myself... and having a clear conscience is not always possible... q:]
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The obvious problem of:
What if I need information that is on my PDA while talking on the phone?
A situation that can very easily arise, and with an all in one solution... well, you're screwed.
* No claim of uniqueness for each color is expressed or implied
** If Gray isn't a color, what is it?
For those who actually own a Palm m130 and are more than a little honked off about this, shoot me an e-mail.
I am putting together the class members to begin a class action suit against Palm to force them to take responsibility for this.
Don't think you are going to get boatloads of money or anything, but they will have to sit up and take notice of the fact that they can't just say oops I'm sorry, but not offer refunds for at least a portion of the cost of these units. I mean come on, 12 bit v. 16 bit, who do they think they are kidding.
From wired:
But by using blending techniques, the company can display 58,621 "color combinations
This is exactly how Palm wants people to perceive the Knowledge Library article. I.e. that the m130 can *display* 58,621 color combinations. This is simply not true.
Now have a look at Palm's Knowledge Libarary article:
Palm is updating its statements of color capability, because it has since learned that the combination of color technologies it employed deliver about 58,621 color combinations, an approximate 11 percent difference.
Note now they use the word *deliver* instead of *display*. The m130 can only *display* 4096 colors at a time, but by updating those colors realy fast, it can create the *illusion* of 58,621 colors. The colors are 'delivered' to the user's mind, by tricking his brain into blending different colors.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Palm's claim is that, through "color-blending" (i.e. dithering), the 12-bit screen comes close to the 16-bit screens 65,000 colors. But what if you use this "color-blending" on the 16-bit screen? Then you would end up with much more than 65,000 colors. So their comparison is apples to oranges and is one of the most ridiculous pieces marketing drivel I've ever heard.
What if "back away VERY slowly" is an act of aggression in their culture?
Logically, it's a bit hard to imagine a course of evolution that would yield beings which consider something moving away from them to be a threat.
It's a PDA, it has a resolution of 160x160, what are you going to do? Watch artwork scans? Watch MPEG movies? what do you need even 4096 colours on a 16x16 pda for? A virtual tour of the Louvre?
Get a life! (Yes, I know, I should get a life too!)
Enjoy!
Jeroen.
Remeber, we were all supposed to have 1-bit screens on the old monochrome palms, but it turns out, they could really deliver 4-bit greyscale!
Palm delivered us three of those four extra bits for YEARS, and we never thanked them.
I think it call kinda comes out in the wash.
Oh, and one more thing: Who cares? It's not like you're going to do world-perfect VR by strapping 2 palms in front of your eyes, so what's the big deal?
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
4096 colors available only in HAM mode.
Last I saw, she was sitting on my penis.
This "Framerate control" is called "Temporal Modulation" in some circles. It works very well with LCD displays because they have such a long decay period (change the pixel color, and it takes a while to really change on the display). If the refresh rate is, say, twice the response of the LCD display, then you can double your RGB values by doing two-frame temporal modulation. That would yield 32k colors. If you were to do four-frame temporal modulation, that would give you 64k colors.
:)
One thing I don't know is how different shades are done on an LCD in the first place. It may be some high-rate temporal modulation in the first place, although I doubt that. One thing I know is that LCD panels have a sinusoidal gamma curve, and this is because brightness levels come from the angle of rotation of the crystals. 90 degrees gives you black, 0 degrees is white. If you were to rotate the crystal by linear angle, it would not be a sinusoidal color response.
Of course, add on top of that the fact that even a linear scale in light emission (luminance) is not a linear scale to the human eye (luma). These are why LCD displays are notorious at having poor color response, and the manufacturers don't seem to be smart enough to compensate for it, even though the math is butt easy to people like our esteemed friend Dr. Charles Poynton.
Oh, and Temporal Modulation is not a linear interpolation. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
Microsoft taking over does *not* mean *you* buying a palm based on MS software. It occurs when the majority switches to it. And unfortunately, with Palm adding almost nothing new to its OS, it is the way to go.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
Corporate america is run by short sighted greed. Execs don't recieve any compensation for leaving a company in good shape, they only get paid for making more money while they are there.
The poeple at the top, who make the desisions about this stuff know that in the long run it is bad, but in the short it is bad to do the right thing, and they only have insentives to make more money now, because they know that they probably will be working for some other company in 5 years...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
It was a bodge, Jay Miner wasn't even going to bother putting it in the OCS chipset but someone must of changed his mid.
(16-1)*4+1 = 31
Uh... according to xcalc, (16-1)*4+1 is more like 61.
(16-1)*2+1 = 15
Likewise, 31. Would be bad to dither 16 real colors into only 15 dithered colors... I mean, you would actually *loose* one.
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
You're a shining idiot if you believe any marketing crap from ANY company. ALWAYS check the data they give you. You've only yourself to blame in this.
Its deceptive, RDF-controlled apple cocksuckers like you that give the rest of apple users a bad name. I could say "next century" (suggesting ~100 years) to describe the 1-month difference between Dec 1999 and Jan 2000, but I happen to have integrity. Get some too.
A while back I was in the States, and one of the things I wanted to do while I was there was to get a PDA - specifically the Clie PEG-S360, which isn't avaliable here in the UK - at least not anywhere that I've found. Anyways, while PDA shopping I visited a Target store, and was fairly surprised to see they were advertising the S360 as having a resolution of 800*600 - The higher-end Clie's have high-res screens (tho not, AFAIK -that- high res(?)), but the S360 is the same small res as all standard palms (160*100, methinks). When I asked one of the guys working there about it, he just muttered some kind of incoherent nonsense about certain software being able to use a higher resolution. Now -THAT- would be a really neat trick.
:)
/. readers will recognise echoes of this if they've ever been in a Dixons shop - not that any self-respecting /.er would)
Anyways, moral of the story is that I ended up getting my PDA elsewhere. For some crazy reason when I'm buying something from someone, I feel a bit more confident if they actually _have a clue_ about the product they're selling
(side note. Any fellow UK
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200108/df2001 0813.jpg
"I bought some instant water... I don't know what to add to it"
"Shenanegan!"
The Kyocera 6035 Smartphone.
:(
Like the Treo, it was designed as a phone first and not a PDA, but with minimal sacrifice of PDA features.
Small screen? Only marginally smaller than those of traditional palms. (I think a difference of around 5mm...)
Apps? Like the Treo, fully PalmOS compatible.
Screen? Only black and white, but that's why the Kyocera blows away every other integrated phone (and many pure-phone devices) in battery life. Standby times of a week with the phone portion turned on are not unheard of.
Overall, from reviews of user experiences, the 6035, while having less features, is more user-satisfying. Partly due to the fact that it in general is a pretty tough phone. (It has a few weak points, but in general, many have accidentally dropped it on concrete/down stairs with the phone barely even getting scratched.)
The Kyocera 7135 (Coming out in September or October most likely - Kyo is being VERY secretive about the release date, but Verizon/Sprint reps seem to think Sept/Oct) is going to have a larger display, 16M memory, a flip design so it's smaller overall. Unfortunately, it's giving in to the color-screen fad.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'd be curious to determine how many people railing against Palm specifically, and the corporate world generally, actually bought an m130, much less have an application for it that requires true-color. Furthermore, I'm curious as to why I'm wasting my time calling these folks out. While I am a firm believer in truth-in-advertising, this issue is easily resolved for those who purchased a mis-represented unit via a class-action suit. I guess I think think the world in general, and the technology sector specifically has many issues of far greater immport to rail against. But, ./ generally attracts the whining liberal type who's willing to turn any and all issues into personal crusades, whether they're directly affected, or involved with it or not.
Didn't Palm announce a while ago their intentions to phase out their hardware business and simply license PalmOS?
(Which blows away WinCE hands-down, period.)
MS will never win because WinCE devices have the same pitfalls that kept the Newton in the niche - They're too big. Palms are smaller. Period. In the PDA market, smaller size and better battery life will go a LONG way to making up for a lack of snazzy "features" like color screens (battery hog), 64M RAM (as if the color screen weren't killing your battery already), and a 200+ MHz processor (User: Hey, my palm lasted for a month on a pair of AAAs, why won't this POS last more than a day or so between charges???)
Yes, Palm's market share has gone down, but probably most of their marketshare loss has gone to Handspring and Sony (Also to Kyocera and Samsung with their smartphone products)... Oh wait, they're paying Palm for the OS anyway. Not that much of a loss for them.
The i705 is a sucky idea, except for the unlimited use factor. The new trend is combining full voice phone capabilities into the device (Kyocera Smartphone 6035 and the upcoming 7135, Samsung i300, Handspring Treos)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Microsoft would be best known for making MSBasic if Apple hadn't done the same thing all throught the 1980s. The original Mac was cool in 1984, then they sat on the design for almost 10 years. Finally they upgraded the processor to stay competitive, but kept the horribly kludged OS. Marketshare drained out of Apple. Finally, after 15 years they upgraded their horribly outdated and clunky OS9, but by this time they were pretty much only making desktop publishing machines and executive desk-trophies. No one else cared about Apple anymore. Apple's blundering allowed MS to take over.
It's EASY to get PalmOS 3.5/4.0/4.1 for free, *even downloading from Palm's own site*
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Since when were there Sybian phones??? Umm, well I guess a phone DOES vibrate. (Note, Sybian is a product um... targeted towards females)
I think you meant Symbian...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If a 12-bit screen can display 58,621 "color combinations" then by definition of "combination"
a 13-bit screen can display 117242, and a 16-bit screen can display 937936 "color combinations"
Thats WAY THE HELL MORE "color combinations" than 65535.
Thats a bullshit statement anyway you say it.
It's not slander if it's in a private letter to them. That would be ridiculous - what, are you going to damage their own reputation with themselves or something???
And anyway, slander has to be spoken, the above post is libel, not slander. (If it's anything at all)
Dumbass.
The actual number of colours is 4096, and their estimate was 65536, making their estimate off by 1500%.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's the only reply close to pointing out the problem with his logic. And pointing out the problem is a lot more important since his post is now modded up to 5 :(
One simple rule for its versus it's
Palm Feeling Blue over Color Claim Mistake
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Life just got a little less colorful for Palm Inc. (NasdaqNM:PALM - News)
Palm, the dominant maker of handheld computers, disclosed on Monday that its $249 m130 handheld can display far fewer colors than the company originally claimed.
The m130 -- whose slogan is "as colorful as your life" -- can really display only 58,621 colors, not 65,536 colors, said company spokeswoman Marlene Somsak.
The disclosure, first reported by Wired News, came after months of speculation by some dedicated Palm followers that the device's marketing information was incorrect.
"We discovered that indeed the screen delivers about 11 percent fewer colors than we had believed," Somsak said. She said the product was designed to display the full 65,000 colors, but was not actually built in a way that would allow the display of so many colors.
The company is offering an apology and an explanation to customers, but no rebate or recall, Somsak said.
The error comes as Palm reels from shrinking demand and a technology slump that have sent its stock price tumbling.
(Celui que tient la peur de devinir nuage)
You'll notice that 3Com says that two techniques are used to turn this 12-bit screen into a pseudo-16-bit screen. The first of these techniques is "frame rate techniques," in which pixels are changed quickly between two colors in order to simulate a third color -- now, *if* this is being done *in hardware*, then I think it's fair for them to say that they have "x *effective* colors," where x > 4096.
:) Even so, unlike "frame rate techniques", I don't see "dithering" (even when done in hardware) as a means to boost their claim of the number of colors that their panel can display, because even hardware-based dithering will degrade the effective screen resolution.
What gets me is when they have to fall back on mentioning dithering -- the process of using *multiple* pixels to simulate an intermediate color. I hope they are doing this in hardware and not relying on Palm developers to do it for them.
I think that people are interested in "bits per *pixel*." If 3Com wants to say "5 *effective* bits per pixel," (because they're using hardware-based pixel-flipping techniques) then I think that's acceptable. But if you're going to avoid mentioning pixels and start talking about "color combinations," then I think they've crossed the line of common sense and are trying to be deceptive. We don't care about how many possible colors we can display using 4 pixels -- we want to know how many we can display using *1 pixel*!
Daniel Robbins
If you only had one pixel. It would be able to display all of the 64,000 different colors, just not at the same time. Color depth refers to number of different colors each dot can become. It is completely independant of the number of dots on a screen
You know, 4096 colors is a far cry from 65,535, but in the whole thick of things its not that big of a deal. (Except maybe for those who are trying to port photoshop). I'm glad that Palm admitted their mistake. Many, many companies do far worse on a daily basis, fully aware of their deceitful actions.
-Sean
I have a PocketPC and a few Palms. The color on the PocketPC is better (of course WinCE is totally unusable garbage, and the PocketPC is typically a monsterous laptop pretending to be a PDA. MS would've been better off installing Win95 or WinNT4 on these instead of WinCE oh well, unfortunetly nobody has ported Linux to my particular varient. Casiopeia E125).
Anyways Palm claiming that a 12-bit display looks anything like a 16-bit display is just outright deception. But any person who actually goes to a store and looks at a palm's display and compares it to a PocketPC or Zaurus is going to see a *significant* difference and will more than likely base thier decision on the appearance of the device over the [faulty] numbers given by the marketing.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
..when you can get the gorgeous Sony Clie T615 for only $20 more! * 320x320 res * Bright colors * decent sound (for midis and wava no mp3 decoding) I was a no brainer when I have to chose one of them.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
In any case, nobody buys a Palm for a nice-looking screen. That's what a CLIE is for.
As soon as PalmUAE is released, I'm there, baby!
If it factors to 31*31*61:
dithering a 4-bit (16 value) field would get 31 values.
The neighbor of each pixel would either be the same value, or the next
highest value, except if it was the max value, so (2^x)*2-1.
That's fine for the 31, but doesn't explain the 61.
Now, what if for the 61, they were alternating two 31-value(4 bit dithered)
fields? That's 31+31-1 or 61. Bingo. Probably green.
So, the M130 _does_ have 16-bit color. R(4bit)+G(4bit)+G(4bit)+B(4bit) most
likely. The _screen_ on the other hand may only have a 4-bit datapath to
each element R(4bit)+G(4bit)+B(4bit)=12 bits.
What do you think sirs?
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
...and then explained it had been a mistake, but that the engine delivered "nearly v8 performance", the government and Consumer's Union would have their asses in court. Why is Palm held to a lower standard? They said the display was 16-bit, people bought it, but it's only 12-bit. That, my friends and fellow slashdoters, is fraud. And it's only only legal if you're a big corporation - oh wait, never mind then.
I'm the stranger...posting to
"loose" != "lose"
You are probably correct, a class action lawsuit ends up giving the attorneys who handled it money and the class members end up receiving something less than they thought they should. I agree completely. But what is your solution? Let Palm just get away with the false advertising. What incentive do they ever have to actually tell the truth on their packaging if all they have to do is say oops we messed up and we will fix the packaging...
What about the people who bought it on the basis that it was a 16 bit display for a good price. Perhaps they would not have otherwise purchased this product at the price it was knowing it only had a 12 bit display. At the very least Palm pays some attorneys fees and gets some pretty crappy PR and maybe next time thinks twice before tossing a label on a box that isn't true...
LegalEagll
If they want to claim 58621 colors, I say fine. But they are doing that by dithering. That means they have to drop the cliam that that have 160x160 resolution and say they have something like 80x80 resolution.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Jan 1, 2001 was the start of the current century.
This is the other way around on Casio.
The Cassiopeia has a 64-bit NEC processor that is forced down to 32-bit by Casio. But at least they don't advertise it as 64 bit.
If you really want Palm OS, get a Sony CLIE which has colors that do seem more alive then the Palm colors!
Well, the sad thing is that I don't think there really is a good solution for the consumer.
Sure, punishing Palm with a lawsuit might bring some satisfaction. But the end result will likely bring little or no relief to the people suckered into buying an m130 that only does 12 bit color.
If Palm wanted to do the right thing, they would offer cash back (not a coupon toward future purchases) to anyone who bought an m130. Of course it will probably be cheaper for them to simply settle a lawsuit.
What would be great is if the FTC stepped in and smacked Palm down hard for false advertising.
Palm gets a nice fine, and the lawyers don't get rich. And Nelson gets to say "HA HA!"
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Back in 1996, my first publically-released program for the Apple Newton was a little demo app called "Time Domain Grey" that could display greyscale pictures on a Newton with a black-and-white screen. The Newton had a 2-color display, but if you launched my program you could see a picture using 5 clean greyscale shades. The shades used were:
(1) 0% black aka "white"
(2) 25% black
(3) 50% black
(4) 75% black
(5) 100% black
My composite picture was composed of four carefully-dithered-to-black-and-white images which my program cycled though at high speed. A 25% black pixel would be set in only one of the four frames; a 50% black pixel would be set in two of them, and so on. Since the screen had a pretty slow decay rate, the illusion worked.
Had I provided an API, I could have let application writers display arbitrary 5-color images on a 2-bit display. Or on a device with a faster refresh ability (but still a slow decay rate) I could have used ten frames or twenty or a hundred to display any arbitrary number of shades on that 2-color display.
Palm claims to be using a similar method to multiply the available shades on the m130. They cite "frame-rate control and dithering techniques", which is exactly what I used. You start with a high-res image, dither it into several frames that individually fit in the color space of your underlying hardware, cycle through those frames at an appropriate rate, and you've got a hi-res video mode with a composite color space that exceeds the single-frame color space.
In conclusion: The fact that the hardware has a 12-bit display is simply not sufficient to establish that they can't show their advertised 58,621 color combinations or more, so we should probably stop jumping to conclusions about it.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Purdue was given some 12-bit X terminals from HP around 1991 or so. The color on them was ugly as sin. To a man everyone preferred the 256 color palette that Sun 3/60s had, unless you were just running a monochrome X setup anyways. I can't imagine that this will look any better.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
I have the m505 - is there any word on whether the color blending applies here too??
Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
That's been common knowledge since the Palm m130 came out. That and a few other screen tradeoffs combine to form a screen that's substansially less easy to read than the IIIc, which is why I stuck with the IIIc until just recently. (I have an NR70V now.)
give the rest of apple users a bad name.
Hey calander impaired jackass - who said I was an Apple user?
When Jobs came back, I stopped buying Apple's.
Shades of black/white are tones, not colors. Tone refers to the lightness/darkness of something.
If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
After a couple hours of being transferred around the various divisions of Palm inc. and waiting a couple of days for a response, I just was promised a full refund for my m130 and I didn't even need to yell or swear. Call 1-408-503-7000 and wait for a live person. Good luck.
Palm is deciding on how to copenstate m130 owners.. also they give a technical explaination of how the screen works... all avalible at the PalmInfoCenter.com
Your mammas flamebait.
The m505 was sold in Australia as having an inbuilt expenses application (it's noted on the box and in the instructions), but it doesn't -- I confirmed with Palm Australia. I didn't really give a damn when I bought mine, but I could imagine some people being quite pissed off about that. OK, so where's that refund?