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-- Soundoff: Color (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=1469)

Color will happen wether you like it or not. Look back in history.....everything migrates to color...

Movies....
TV......
Computers.....
Laptops......

It is a fact of life that color just looks better.

Color will be expensive to start out with...just as it was with the above mentioned devices.....but it will get cheaper and better. Doesn't mean that we all have to go out and buy one now....but my prediction is that in 2 years the only PDA option you will have is color....

Just my 2 cents.....

Heyday

It's obvious that none of you have color or you'd know what you're missing. I have both a Visor and an HP548 and color makes such a difference I seldom use my Visor anymore (Except when I know I'll be outside as the HP548 screen is no good in sunlight). As to wirelesss capability all these devices will have Bluetooth and more in the coming year so that'll take care of itself IMO. Your mileage may vary.

There's no question that future Palm OS PDAs will be color, just as every other device has migrated to color displays. But for now, Palm and Handspring have to think about their priorities.

I'm not so sure the Hawkins will release a color Visor like everyone expects. Yes, Handspring's licensed the color OS, but that's probably to keep it's long-term options open. Historically, Hawkins has been a lateral thinker that avoids obvious next moves. Notice how lukewarm he was on the subjects of color and screen resolution at PC Expo. Given his evangelism of "better voice calling," I suspect that Handspring's next model will provide this functionality, to be used in conjunction with the cell phone module the company's said to be coming out with at the end of the year.

I hope to get a color PDA once the teething problems have gone away (poor quality, bad in sunlight etc etc) and when the price will be resonable...

I think Palm fixed the battery use problem on color screens when they intoduced the 3C.
But that screen hase HUGE pixels....

hopefully in a year they will have fixed those issues.
Hey the visor came with the improved grayscale screen, so hopefully the ColorVisor (CV?) will have an improved color screen too when/if it gets introduced...

Color would be great, but I think we're a ways off from having a usable color screen. What I'd really like to see is better greyscale depth and higher resolution with a better backlight.

Does the Indiglo technology use more power than the current backlighting method?

Also, I'm not sure that a white background would be a good idea if you have to read your screen in bright sunlight. The slightly green or yellowish tint is fine with me.

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Originally posted by Gameboy70:
Given his evangelism of "better voice calling," I suspect that Handspring's next model will provide this functionality, to be used in conjunction with the cell phone module the company's said to be coming out with at the end of the year.

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Originally posted by mbaime: It's obvious that none of you have color or you'd know what you're missing.

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Originally posted by mbaime:
It's obvious that none of you have color or you'd know what you're missing.

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Originally posted by briareus:
Color would be great, but I think we're a ways off from having a usable color screen. What I'd really like to see is better greyscale depth and higher resolution with a better backlight.

Does the Indiglo technology use more power than the current backlighting method?

Also, I'm not sure that a white background would be a good idea if you have to read your screen in bright sunlight. The slightly green or yellowish tint is fine with me.

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I would like a color screen, but to me a bigger screen is more important than color. Throw away the "silk" area and extend the bitmap the the bottom of the glass, then render it back in in software. THEN add a call so an application can request extra real-estate, either most of it or all of it, if it doesn't need graffiti input. You'd let the silk shrink in two stages... first, to a little bar at the bottom with six buttons (the original four plus one for "zoom out" to silk size, and one to render a keyboard in the silk area) and then to completely under the application's control.

This would give you 25% more space, and the option of having a keyboard that didn't overlay the application areas... and most applications wouldn't need to know about it because the size and aspect ratio of the screen are they use wouldn't need to change.

It wouldn't even break programs that wrote directly on the screen, since they don't currently render in the silk area they wouldn't try to under the new regime.

My next PDA will be color. I bought my GraphiteVDX last May because of the price and the amount of function it provided. The plan is for the current unit to last me 2 years. I will then be in the market for something else. I figure 2 years will be more than enough time for new battery, color screen, processor and memory technologies to be created and available on the cheap. I do not intend to spend more than $250.00 for the next one, and unless Microsoft radically rethinks their focus per the PocketPC, I won't be considering their products.

I want color, but I agree with the above posters that 16 or even 16 bit color sucks. I also love the freedom that disposable batteries give me. I can pick them up anywhere and I don't have to worry about it. I may add wireless to this unit, but more than likely I will wait the two years until the next one which will probably have it built-in as well.

I see the convergence of cell phones and PDA's very soon and this would be the type of device I would buy.

Don't hold your breath for improvements in rechargeable batteries. We are more than two years away from anything better than the Lithium Ion battery. The only hope for color is improvements in display tech, where some progress is being made . . . but again, the pace of this progress is not going to give you lower power requirements in the next two years (especially if you include the migration to more powerful CPUs).

This is why it would be better for Palm to focus on greater resolution and bit depth in grayscale; and add support for larger Palm OS devices (so you could get a Palm tablet device if you want more screen real estate). Technically, these are things that were possible years ago, and they still haven't been done!

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Originally posted by heyday:
Color will happen wether you like it or not. Look back in history.....everything migrates to color...

Movies....
TV......
Computers.....
Laptops......

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Two important points have been brought up in this thread that I'd like to expand on:

1: Higher Resolution

Most WinCE/PPC PDAs do 320x240. Now, I feel they do this so they can have fancier looking widets, etc. and sharper fonts. I don't think either of those is a bad idea.

But there of course would be the bacwards compatability problem. You certainly don't want an old program showing up in the upper-left quarter of your screen. I suggest making the new PalmOS which supports such reslutions to default into a double-pixel mode (everything is lit up in 2x2 chunks). If a newer program is written, it could take advantage of a system call which puts it into that higher-resolution mode where pixels are indivually addressable again.

Other people have suggested a 320x240 resultion, but I suggest 320x320. 320x240 has the advantage of being quarter-VGA resolution. But on the PalmOS, we have no legacy reason to use that. The advantage of 320x320 is that it would make emulating 160x160 extremely simple. Furthermore, PalmOS devices already use a screen with a 1:1 aspect ratio. If we swtiched to 320x240 either the aspect ratio of the pixels or the screen as a whole would have to change. At 320x320, a 1:1 aspect ratio is maintained for both.

With higher resoltuions, we could have better graphics, a sharper UI, more readable fonts, etc.

2: Visor OS support for 16-grays

I'm vexed again and again that most programs only support 4 grays on the Visor since that's all the OS supports. The hardware, however, can do more. Fireviewer, for example, takes advantage of the hardware on the Visor directly and shows 16 grays. However, it is the exception to the rule.

Is it even possible for Handspring to come up with a patch to support new OS features, even if its only this one?

Personally, I'd like to see OS3.5-level graphics support so kAWT's KVM would run in true gray-scale on my Visor.


Just my $0.02


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Trinition ([email protected])

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Originally posted by Trinition:
Other people have suggested a 320x240 resultion, but I suggest 320x320.

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Actually, they need to go well beyond 320x320. The OS needs to evolve so future advances in hardware won't require an application rewrite with each incremental increase in screen resolution. It is not like this hasn't been done before with other OS, and it positions the Platform to serve more than just the handheld market. Why wouldn't Palm want to compete with CE in the 640x240 space (or any other form factor that a licensee wants to use)?

If you want higher resolution, don't hold your breath for Handspring. Higher resolution would require software emulation, which would require a processor with more horsepower than the Dragonball. And if anyone remembers Jeff Hawkins' keynote at PC Expo, he didn't sound the least bit anxious to switch to a faster processor (which he dismissed at "conventional thinking"). But Palm might do it, since they claim they're going for StrongARM.

I really could care less about color in a Palm unit. For me it's just not needed. My next unit won't be for a long while anyway, my Visor deluxe is great the way it is.

Tom

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Originally posted by JHromadka:
After a week's hiatus, Soundoff returns this week to ask about color. How important is it to you? Will your next Palm-compatible be a color one, or are other features more important to you?

I personally can't wait for color. Many of the Springboard modules (i.e. Geode) can be flash upgraded to have color support. Color GPS would be fantastic to see, and people would actually be able to give real presentations using their Visor.

What do you think?

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The EMF radiation from my Visor is minimal, except when the backlight is on. The color screens have much worse EMF. Thus I will stick with black and white until/unless they fix this.