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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!
640 colours ought to be enough for everyone...
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."
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"
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.
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.
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?
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?
Palm published incorrect information which probably led many away from competitors' products. This is serious stuff. Now those people (including me) feel a bit deceived.
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
You've entirely missed the point.
The device has been marketed, branded and sold as a having 16bit capabilites, when in reality it only has 12bit capabilites.
It's got nothing to do with asthetics.
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.
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.
Compaq actually markets the iPaq as having a 12 bit screen. Therefore, people who wanted higher res may have bought the Palm instead, thinking they were getting something much better. Oh, by the way, I have a computer to sell you. It runs at 17 Ghz. Ok, I lied, it's only 1.5 Ghz, but your old computer was only 800 Mhz, so really, why are you complaining?
do not read this line twice.
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.
Because the blending technique is nothing more than dithering.
From the Palm support site:
The color technologies Palm employed in the m130 handheld to deliver text and images include frame-rate control and dithering techniques. (Frame-rate control turns pixels off or on to deliver a specific shade of color. Dithering uses a group of adjacent pixels to convey a composite color.)
If Palm gets away with this, we will never know the bit depth of video cards, handhelds, cell phones, etc. since companies will be able to claim any number they want because their product's display can dither. I say nip this in the bud and get Palm to admit it only produces 4,096 colors.
And yes, I am aware that they claim it uses "frame rate control" too, but it seems this is nothing more than a pixel flashing so it appears to be a less intense color - surely all displays could do this too.
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
...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!
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.--
But beyond that, I'm not even sure your 16-bit v. 32-bit example is a fair comparison in this case. The differences between individual "adjacent" colors get smaller and smaller the larger you make the palette. To argue your case might be like arguing that the difference between .0001 and .001 is the same as that between 1.0 and 0.1; sure, it's only a decimal place, but the resulting error would be far greater in the second case.
Terrible example. Were you planning to use all 4,000 of those colors on your wall at the same time? (If the answer's "yes", I'd like to humbly apologize, Sir Elton John. My mother loves your music.)Liking a screen or not is a subjective thing. Some people object to being able to see the pixels on the palm units but I personally find it easier to look at than the higher resolution screens on the iPaq, at least for text.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
2 ** 16 of course, not that the human eye would actually be able to perceive the differences between some of them.
I don't know about you, but I can read numbers about what a display can do all day or I can pick up the two and put them side by side and decide for myself which looks better to me. More colors doesn't mean easier to look at and read, it just means more colors.
What?
Because Palm took a universally-understood benchmark -- bit depth in colour -- and advertised an incorrect value. That's either incompetence or dishonesty. Then, when caught, they suddenly want to redefine the universally-accepted benchmark into something that is more palatable to them but incomprehensible to everyone else.
Both the original error/lie and the spin are designed to obfuscate and make it harder to make a rational, intelligent decision. This, to me, implies that even Palm feels it cannot compete on a level playing field... which is why Palm is off my list for my next handheld.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Sure, only I bought mine on-line & had only got the published spec to go on, as well as what I'd seen of the M5xx colour series which are actually true 64k machines. I didn't have any Handspring machines to compare to - they don't appear to sell here in Ireland (indeed, some of the Palm models are manufactured here).
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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.
Um, CRTs are analog, and produce actual intensity changes for each color in a pixel. I'm not sure of the mechanism used in LCD screens, but I can tell you with certainty that the 16-bit screen on my Visor Prism isn't using dithering, the pixels are big and noticeable enough that it would be hideously ugly if it was. I don't notice any flicker either.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
* No claim of uniqueness for each color is expressed or implied
** If Gray isn't a color, what is it?
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
Anyway, heavy "palm" users only need black and white for text plus 4094 skin tones.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
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.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200108/df2001 0813.jpg
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?
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?
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?
Also, you will be able to use 64 in ExtraHalfBrite, but 32 of those will just be 50% dimmer versions of the first 32.
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.
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
The Compaq iPAQ has a 16-bit screen actually. The old 3600 series had 12-bit, but all the current colour models have 16-bit displays.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
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
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
It's pretty damn obvious that Palm was hoping they wouldn't get caught... And now is relying on marketing-lingo lawyerspeak that has no relation to the actual capabilities of their hardware.
You know, when technology companies treat their customers as fools, it's usually the sign of a technology company that's going to be appearing on a certain f*ckedcompany.com site shortly...
Note to future marketing gurus: BSing tech-savvy consumers is not a wise career move...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
The point of putting the class-action lawsuit together is not to get any huge financial settlement.
The point is to give the company so much bad PR that they're willing to do whatever it takes to fix the problem.
Even FILING a class-action suit, is usually enough to make the company look like idiots in the media, and convince their shareholders to whack the boardmembers with the rolled up newspaper and get them to fix the problems.
It's worked before, and it will work again.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
As soon as PalmUAE is released, I'm there, baby!
...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
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.
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!
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.