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Does anyone see the lack of color for the Visor and Palm units to be a big issue? The main beef about color used to be the battery consumption... but the new Casio E-105 seems to have improved on that quite a bit...
Any thoughts?


[This message has been edited by GodOfSales (edited 10-05-1999).]

I get from one to two months of battery life from my PalmPilot. (With heavy usage) Until a Windows CE unit can go at least a week under normal usage, it is too limiting for me. (Not to mention how slow and cumbersome WinCE is to use.)

-Eric

Sometimes colour isn't that big an issue. Gameboy lasted only about 8 years or so before they went to colour... and colour wasn't THAT big a deal.. they even managed to squeeze as much battery life out of the GBC with 2 AA's as they did with the original GB that had 4AA.

If palm eventually goes to colour, don't expect a full blown active matrix 18 million colour machine. Probably 64 if they were smart.. at least that's what I feel is only necessary.. maybe 256, but no more.

until they can get good battery life from a color unit, I hope they stick with B&W. The color isn't that big of a deal to me. Now, if they had color, without sacrificing battery life and without raising the price too much, then I'd welcome it. Until then, I'm happy with the Visor as an organizer, not a picture album!

I think the constant backlight lightting for color drains the battery out fast. There is probably no workaround since a larger size because of batteries would probably not appeal to the market.

I still don't understand how is color going to improve my life?

[This message has been edited by rsperko (edited 10-05-1999).]

..we said that about color TV too many years back...

Color PDAs would be nice if the battery live problem could be solved.

I was in a mall yesterday and saw a Casio 100 (105??notsure??whocares??) with some sort of small video on the screen It was really impressive (I have to admit).

I never used Windows CE, so I don't want to bash it. I got Palm because there are plenty of applications ready and its well developed.

Hip Hop, I watch TV for the pictures, I watch my PDA for information, most of it in textual format. So color isn't a big deal to me. The greyscale screen gives me the info as though I was reading it off a paper page...well almost off a page.

I agree with the majority of you, color is not a very big deal to me... I think for what I'm going to use the PDA for, battery life is more important... the Casio 105 claims to have battery life improved to 25 hours, a significant improvement over the Casio 100, which I believe was around 8 hours... but still not as good as Palm/Visor models... Sure it would be nice to watch digital video clips and play stereo noises on my PDA... then I remember... how often do I actually do that, even on my desktop PC?? Almost never... so there you have it... I think Casio and other Win CE products have some neat bells and whistles... most of which you'd use once, show your friends occassionally, and eventually forget about...

There was some talk a while back of the potential of using the GameBoy color screen for the Pilot, since they were relativly low on power consumption and the same size as the Pilot.

I still would rather have a regular Palm screen with the graffiti area as usable screen area (i.e. the ability to turn off or modify what it currently the silkscreen area). For me personally, I would rather have that above color.

jonpod

Now that's a great idea!!

I like the idea of the graffiti being user definable. Have a base display that echoes the current Visor look-feel, but allow for programmer definable icons, etc.

Heck, if you did that, theoretically, you could return a good deal of display area to the form factor.

If color was such a big issue why then is Palm still out selling CE color machines by a margin of 5 to 1. Once Palm/Visor gets a color machine to market they'll capture nearly the rest of the market.

The major advantage that the CE machines had was synching directly with Windows and Outlook. Now that the Palm/Visor conduit is part of the package alot of the advantage has been removed.

Let's face it most Palm users don't care about color relative to functionality otherwise 5 Million would not have been sold. Now that we have the capability to expand to other things (soon) such as Mpeg etc then color will just be the final enhancement.

Color will eventually have to come to the Palm/Visor platform. Remember the early laptops had monochrome screens? It did take about 4 or 5 years for the technology of LCD and TFT to surpass the cost versus astethics factor.

I said it before in another post. I'd bet that a release of a color Palm will come with the IPO when Palm is spun off from 3COM. I know - that's what I'd do...help drive up the stock price so that I could be come the next Bill Gates (wish!).

Something to think about...
When you talk about colour in palm applications....Primarily You're talking about entertainment applications (ie:games,movies etc.)which require incredible resources...The time will come..When people expect to be able to watch that movie on their Palm or Play that new super-fast video game on their Palm...Palm & Handspring will be THERE when the market demands it!

Actually, the biggest things that WinCE can do are: Edit Word Documents in a "native" format. Run PowerPoint presentations. And (My personal Favorite) Run ICA or RDP client to connect to a Metaframe or Terminal Server. It is pretty cool to be able to run a full-blown version of NT on a WinCE.

It is not enough for me to bail on my beloved PalmOS device. But I do wish that Palm / Handspring could do those things.

(CES whipped Excel. Looks like they might have figured out Word too! Check out http://www.cesinc.com

Just to give you all an idea of just how popular Windows CE Palm-size Pc's are, Check out CNET News.com, They have just posted a news story that Philips has just announced that they are dropping their Nino line of Palm PC's. Bye bye baby, bye bye!

What's the big deal about the Compaq Aero 1530? I owned a Casio Casioppeia E-100 for exactly 2 weeks. I finally took the damn thing back to Best Buy and told them where they could shove it.

It was the most worthless handheld I've ever owned. You couldn't take the damn thing outdoors or anywhere near a sunlit window or else the screen was unreadable.

And because it runs Windows CE, I could get virually no software whatsoever for it.

[This message has been edited by foo fighter (edited 10-07-1999).]