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Palm Offers Refund to m130 Owners
EyesWideOpen writes "On Wednesday Palm began notifying registered m130 owners "that they were entitled to a full refund, including taxes paid on the PDA" for misleading them about the actual number of colors the product supports. The m130 was originally advertised as supporting 65,536 colors when in actuality it can only display 58,621. Owners who choose to forfeit the refund and keep the PDA could instead download a free version of the video game SimCity." Looks like a great deal for those who don't care about the bit depth of their PDA, and a way out for those who do.
I would be shocked too if I would find out that I can't display all 65536 colours on a screen with 25600 pixels!
bash$
Why cant i find cool old games like this for my palm? Can anybody direct me to a site that offers cool games for palms pilots (preferably classic games, like that flash version of pitfall somebody posted the other day)?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Other than bragging rights what difference does the reduced amount of colours make?
I presume people are not purchasing these to watch movies
I think it will be interesting to see how many people ask for the refund...
"We lied to you, so here is a refund... oh, you like the product anyways? Well is is a crappy game for free. Oh, you already subscribe to alt.warez? Well... here... um. *click*"
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
For the lazy, the comparison between the Prism (real 16-bit) and m130 can be found here.
However, by inspecting this picture, i think that Palm may actually be trying to cover up the fact that there are only 58000-some colors using the dithering technique and that in real life there are actually only 4096 colors.
Its not even 58k colours for real. That's simluated from the hardware limited 12-bit (4k) colour depth. (Or at least that's what TechTV sez).
Palm users were really ripped off, IMHO.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Would you return your Pentium because it does almost all divisions correctly?
Like the Pentium bug this isn't a cases of whether users will notice a difference. It's about a company owning up to its mistakes.
It doesn't even display the 50,000 color number the claim.. it is 12 bit color.
They claim that by 'color mixing' you can get more colors..
The problem is not that it can display only "58000" colors, but that it can really only display 4000 colors. That 58,000 number is arrived at by "using a variety of techniques--including turning pixels on and off and combining nearby pixels." (News.com article) So yeah, if Palm advertised that the m130 could display 65536 (16bpp) and it can only do 4096 (12bpp), then I would be complaining. HP had the same problem with earlier Jornadas they released, because they advertised 16bpp and only supported 12bpp (the crazy thing here is that they call the problem a "glitch", when it's a simple fact that the screens they used only supported 12bpp -- sounds like a glitch in the manufacturing process by choosing to use a cheaper screen). Compaq didn't have this problem, because they always advertised at 12bpp, not 16bpp.
In other words, the issue here isn't that the PDA can only do 12bpp, but that Palm advertised it at 16bpp and was caught out in their lie.
I know it's a little off-topic but regardless of how Palm decided to handle this situation, we should all be glad that a class action lawsuit wasn't filed. In Madison County IL. there is a group called ILAW (Illinois Lawyer Abuse Watch (I think))investigating class action lawsuits and some of their findings are scary.
Verizon went through a class action lawsuit and all the participants were awarded some trivial $20 refund, or some voucher for a free month of service while the lawyers raked in millions of dollars.
These 'millions' get written off by the company and get passed to us. Not to say all Class-Action lawsuits are bad, but some are down right scary.I know off-topic a tad. Oh well.
:wq!
And yes, if I had bought an m130 for viewing photos, I'd be infuriated, because that's blatant false advertisement. At least they're doing the honorable thing, if a bit late.
I'll just wait for them to send me the extra 6,915 colors in the mail.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I can only relate to this vicariously through you. Hell, you think Twister is tough for you! "What do you mean left foot red?
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Protected from the elements and able to withstand 4 foot drops drops is what I am looking for! Wher the Hell do you want to go today!
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
That link doesn't work, so try this
I didn't know what dithering was before I looked at the picture but this is what I gather from it. If you have a 1 bit display (just black and white), if you make every other pixel black, and every other pixel white, it will give the appearance of being gray (especially at higher resolutions). That is what dithering is. This is opposed to showing a pixel that is actually gray (half black half white, that is, each sub pixel [red, blue, green] on equal intensity, at half intensity). So the difference between 12 bit dithering, as the m130 does, and true 58,000 colors is considerable. The fact that Palm's spin on it is that it shows 58,000 colors instead of 64,000 leads me to believe that they knew all along about the limitations in the device.
Even if you can get 12-bit (dithered) color to look almost as good as non-dithered 16 bit color (which you can't, but lets just assume), it's still fraud. 16 bit color can be made to look even better if it is dithered. The only way they could've avoided fraud (and even then it would've been sketchy) is if they said "16-bit quality color" or "as good as 16-bit color"
And whoever thinks that the difference between 12 bit color and 16 bit color is just for bragging rights, I suggest they play video games. Even with 32 bit color, if alpha is using some of those bits, you will *still* see color banding, especially in motion. The next generation of videocards is working on 64-bit color (although, they're not actually displaying at 64 bits, just 64 bits are used for calculations, to minimize cumulative color distortion through multiple passes).
Unless you live in Greece... ;-)
IIRC, the original game boy used black and white strobing to create the four color effect. I've seen calculator programs (for the ti-8x and 9x calcs) that could display color images as well.
Of course, the contrast wasn't as good or anything. It would be interesting to see comparisons between the two. Someone posted a link, but it was to geocities, and obviously it's dead now.
Does anyone have the details on how this supposed color increasing worked? I think it would be intresting to see.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
- Advertise that your product offers much more than it really does.
- If anyone complains about your false advertising (which is against the law), wait until after the product has secured its place in the market (and in people's homes/offices) before admitting anything.
- Offer a full refund for the 12 people who would actually rather have their money back than live with their underperforming machines. Placate the rest with a downloadable version of a software product that's over a decade old (after all, the company's only cost-per-download is for the used bandwidth... it's not like they're giving away physical items)
- Result:
- the 12 people who knew they were ripped off shut up because get their money back
- the FTC will never get involved over false advertising charges
- the company still sells (number of units that would have been sold if its claims had been true - 12) units
- the vast majority of consumers think they got something for nothing (software) and laud the company
- Repeat with next product release.
Looks like a great deal for those who don't care about the bit depth of their PDA, and a way out for those who do my a$$... looks like a great marketing/disinformation strategy for Palm.And no, this is not "the way business is done," this is "false advertising." Unfortunately, false advertising is only against the law if people complain.
Even though the Palm can only display 4096 colors without resorting to ugly hacks (like pixel flickering), I don't see what the big deal is.
Ok, they lied in their marketing, that's bad. But they seem to be trying to do the honorable thing here. If the color depth is that important do you just get the refund and buy yourself a Handspring.
But lets work the numbers here: A 160x160 pixel screen has 25600 pixels total. The 12 bits per pixel can only display 4096 unique colors. This means that in the worst case scenario, every color will have to be spread across 6.25 pixels. This doesn't seem all that bad to me. In fact it sounds like just the sort of design tradeoff I might have made. Going all the way up to 65536 unique colors is kind of a waste since you'll never be able to get all of those on the screen at once.
Of course Palm should have advertised it as a 12bit screen right from the start, but I'm not ready to hang them out to dry for this. On the contrary, offering Sim City (which is still a fine game, despite what the vitriol filled posts on here might say) seems like a nice gesture to me. Palm certainly could have done worse.
Does anybody remember IOmega and the Click of Death? Years in lawsuits that just make the scum sucking lawyers richer and richer and what do we get? A coupon from IOmega for some paltry sum off of our next purchase of an IOmega product, long after most of us had swarn off IOmega forever. Would you guys have preferred that?
I read the internet for the articles.
If they want to say it has 58,621 colors then they have to say the screen isn't 160x160 anymore, it's 80x160 or 80x80. The only way to get the 58,621 colors is by DITHERING which kills your resolution.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Why is this modded "insightful"? The analogy is horribly crippled. A display that has to approximate 10% of its colors is not going to make any material difference. A CPU that miscalculates things is going to cause *actual* problems.
The odd part is, the last sentence ("Like the Pentium bug...") more or less contradicts the entire purpose of the analogy. I'm beginning to think Target Drone didn't say what he meant to say. The Pentium bug IS a case where users will notice a difference -- namely, incorrect results, weird crashes, etc. In the Palm case, most people wouldn't be able to tell a difference.
Not that I'm saying that the company shouldn't own up, but let's not use false logic to make a point.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
(I used the same technique to get 5-level greyscale on a 1-bit (black & white) Newton in a demo program called Time Domain Grey.)
I play Nerd-Folk!
So, which elephant to I have to copy in order to get, uh, punished??
Signed,
CmdrTaco
How about if you bought a 650 Mhz processor, but it turns out to be 580 Mhz? Well, the reality is that the m120 is actually 12-bit which displays 4096 colors and cheats to get the 58k magic colors. From seeing it myself, there's no mistake this is a 12-bit display, not a pseudo 15.5 bit display. Just compare it to other 12-bit displays and you'll easily see the difference (or similarities as the case may be). They lied once, and now they lie again. I suppose you could say my Pentium III is a 128 bit processor since it could do 128 bit calculations... right....
Myabe you should get a Sony Clie PEG-SJ30. It really has a nice screen, 320 x 320, with proper backlighting and everything. Here in USA, the Palm m130 is like $250 and the Sony PEG-SJ30 is $300. Definitely worth the extra 50 bucks if you ask me.
Tech plummets in value so fast, I would return the m130 and reinvest in something newer.
So far so good. But suppose you generate TWO complementary frames of dithered 50% grey. In one frame the first pixel is white, in the other it is black. If "O" is white and "X" is black your two frames look like this:
FRAME #1:
OXOX
XOXO
OXOX
FRAME #2:
XOXO
OXOX
XOXO
Now, alternate displaying frames #1 and #2 in rapid succession on an LCD display with a slow decay rate. The resulting image looks like this:
COMBINED FRAME:
****
****
****
Where "*" looks like a pixel that is 50% grey. Not dithered grey, real grey.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Lets be accurate here. It can only display 4096 colors. It's a 12 bit color display, not 16. However Palm marketing wants to twist things, it does not serve the user to repeat marketing hype. They sold this thing as a 16 bit display and it was a 12 bit display. Matters a lot if you want to view photos or color images, and that's the reason many paid for a color toy. The problem is more serious than the "only 58,621 colors as contrasted to 64k" marketing hype.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
In this business ethic-bashing time we've come to, it's nice to see a company that actually cares about its customers and treats them fairly.
-----
Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Your company was once at the top of its field. Now it's being crushed by competition and you've just been forced to admit to an incredibly stupid blunder, and apologizing is going to be costly as hell.
How do you pull your company out of its rut?
[o]_O
I beleive the lie that got Palm in trouble was that it claimed the M130 had "16 bit color" when in fact it has 12 bit color. Dithering has never counted in the past when discussing the number of bitplanes, and it shouldn't really count when discussing the number of colors -- especially on a display with so few pixels. A CGA display is STILL 2-bit color, even if you dither the pixels!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
but only if we re-define what is commonly understood on LCD screens to be a 'pixel'.
My 1600x1200 laptop screen has 1600 red, 1600 green, and 1600 blue sub-pixels across.We don't call it a 4800x1200 screen, though.
So when they say it can display 16 bit color on the color LCD screen, the consumer has a right to assume that means they are using a 656 display... six bits for red, five for green, and 6 for blue (or whatever it is..). saying that you can use more pixels to get more color.. that's just bad advertising.
Actually, with HP, a different display chip was substituted in the manufacturing run by accident.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The fuss is they told us it had 16 bit color, and it only has 12 bit color.
That's like selling you a car saying it has 300HP, but in fact, only has 120.
what is your argument there, that 300HP is too much anyway, and everyone should be happy?
No. It's fraud, and it's illegal, and they are doing the right thing by offering refunds.
Dithering a color with itself doesn't produce a different color. That eliminates 4096 colors right there. Dithering most colors with black or white doesn't produce a color that couldn't be got from a darker or brighter shade of that color. That gets you a few more colors (about 2744?). Not sure how they got that exact number.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I can respect a company that can admit it screwed up.
This is going to cost them tons of money, but unlike the actions other companies, Palm may have just earned my trust.
The Palm device has 12 bit color. Each color sub-pixel (red, green, blue) has 4 bits each, that's 16 shades of color each.
Leaving you with... 4096 colors per pixel.
To claim it does more is to stretch the truth. It is common to accept that when we talk about the # of bits of color, we mean per actual pixel, not sub-pixel.
To group multiple pixels together and then claim it was actually true is just BS
I'm not sure. The knowledge or experience may have some intrinsic value -- maybe you learn something.
I'll spend much longer when fixing something figuring out *why* it broke then just "getting it working again and forgetting about it" because in the long term, this pays off. Well, at least I hope so.
I remember this being written somewhere in a book or magazine: "They were software engineers, the sort of people that will spend four hours calculating different trip routes to save ten minutes taking the shortest possible trip".
This may be less true for simple piracy, but if you're actually cracking the software yourself, there's some educational value to the whole process.
May we never see th
I purchased a refurbished Palm Vx. The device kept losing its calibration which required me to re-run the digitizer. Sometimes it wasn't reachable and required a hard reset. Called Palm, gave them my S/N, a replacement arrived in the mail.
Painless and awesome. Thanks guys.
Yes, that's a much better analogy that I fully agree with :)
I shouldn't have said that there's no material difference between 58k colors and 64k colors (or 12-bit vs. 16-bit, or however you want to characterize it); that was bad phrasing on my part, and I apologize. My point was that the analogy to the Pentium division bug was flawed, in that the two situations were not comparable.
To put it another way... a division bug of that magnitude renders the CPU essentially unusable for everyone, but a MHz misclassification of that magnitude is simply annoying. Although I suppose you COULD argue that the color difference makes the Palm "unusable," but I still maintain that a majority of people would not consider the Palm unusable even if they DID know about the color difference, and ultimately that the Palm color difference is not fatal the way such a division bug would be.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Here it is. I'm a Palm m130 owner & I'm seriously considering taking them up on the offer.....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
There are 25,600 total pixels on a 160x160 display. 12 bit color means you cannot have a scenario with each pixel being a different color. More importantly, it's not so much about simultaneous color, but the total palette. With 12 bit precision, each color has 16 levels. If there is a pure red gradient, it would look like crap, for example. The difference is non-trivial for those who intend to view images on it.
That being said, I have an m130 and don't care about the refund. I don't use my palm to view images, no matter how many colors it could display, the 160x160 restriction is too much to deal with. Even with a 320x320 display, images don't look good enough.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sorry, the division bug of the original Pentium does not "render the CPU essentially unusable". My P60 system is still going strong 6 years later. Way back when, when it was all I had, I even used the darn thing to do my taxes. I checked the math; the rounding problem did not affect the results. OTOH, I did use a test that showed the div bug was indeed there. I never replaced the CPU because the system was use in a critial fashion at the time and I couldn't afford the downtime. For the last few years it's been operating as a firewall, and barely done any FP.
Intel's mistake at the time was saying "this bug won't affect anyone". They didn't intentially create the problem, it was a bug in the chip design. They made a PR blunder by trying to sweep it under the rug, but they finally reversed themselves. It meant a huge earnings hit at the time (although it created a nice aftermarket for cheap Pentium-powered jewerly).
Does the use of 12-bit color make the m130 unusable? No, of course not. It's probably a great 12-bit device -- even better because of the "special dithering" that gets an effective 58000 colors.
The error here is Palm advertising it as a 16-bit device in the first place. The even greater error is Palm continuing to say "it can display 58000 colors, not 65536". They need to fess up with "it only REALLY displays 4096 colors". That they haven't said that is an example of their continued arrogance. I hope the market punishes them.
Darn, I should've sold my Palm stock.
[I was originally going to mod the parent down, but I felt like responding instead]
Yes, I'll agree I wasn't very clear when I said "the parent".
The comment I meant was Dirtside's first response to Target Drone , where he says (repeatedly) that the Pentium with the floating point bug were useless.
Why is this modded "insightful"? The analogy is horribly crippled. A display that has to approximate 10% of its colors is not going to make any material difference
Actually it has to approximate 93% of its colors (all but 4096 of its "58000").
A CPU that miscalculates things is going to cause *actual* problems.
The miscalculations were actually hard to come by; they only happenened in the FPU and only under rare circumstances. The vast majority of Pentium users never encountered the bug.
let's not use false logic to make a point.
Let's not use misrepresentation to make a counterpoint.
bp
Actually, I only mentioned the Pentium bug once in my original post. The other mention (first paragraph, last sentence) was a more general statement delimiting the difference between a CPU that miscalculates things, and a display that has fewer colors.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased