Wily
Member
Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Milpitas, CA, USA
Posts: 3 |
Okay ... once more since I seem to have left some things unsaid regarding how Palm does its licensing... (Or more correctly, what I recall about how Palm does its licensing.)
To sum it all up, the licensees can make modifications to the PalmOS to suit their particular needs, and Palm lets them have excluvisity for a while and then rolls it into the next OS release. Thus, you have Handspring with its 16bit color enhancement sitting out there on its own for about a year before palm released that enhancement in PalmOS 4.0.
So, the enhancements that have been made since then, both HandEra's 320x240 screen and Sony's 320x320 screen will be availible to other Palm licensees as soon as the excluvisity period is up.
quote:
Originally posted by Fat_Man
Palm or Handspring can use Sony's OS high-rez modification all they want to, but without hardware modifications using the graphic controller chip, their units will slow to a crawl ...maybe even slower than that!!!
Okay. The graphic controller is someone else's chip. As stated above, once Sony's excluvisity runs out, the enhancement to PalmOS that allows it to utilize a secondary chip to drive the LCD will be availible to the other licensees. I would expect to see Palm and Handspring color handhelds running the 320x320 screens in the near future.
As for the technical prowlness of the Handspring and Palm teams, I sincerely doubt that they couldn't do what Sony did. The biggest R&D expenditure was modifying the PalmOS to handle the external controller chip, not to dropping the controller chip onto the PCB.
Why didn't Palm or Handspring spend R&D money to do exactly what Sony did? Why re-invent the wheel? If they can use it x months after Sony debuts it, why should they spend the extra money to figure it out themselves. Why didn't Sony develop their own 16bit color for the 710N? Because they knew once the lockout time was up, they would have access to it. By the time Palm or Handspring researched it and finished working prototype that was ready for mass production, the time limit for Sony would have expired and Palm, et al. would have spent all that money on R&D for nothing.
Yes, HandEra has thier own form of high resolution, but their unit is monochrome. I remember reading that HandEra made the choice to offer increase resolution instead of color because with the current processor power, they can only offer one (color or high resolution), but not both options.
Yes. HandEra choose to increase resolution. Their market segment was and still is enterprise. For that market, color is not something they really care about. Increased resolution is something that you could probably get more people on. Also, once again, they could either spend the R&D money to develop their own 16 bit color and wait for when Palm could roll it into the PalmOS and use it then.
Anyhow, this is all I can coherently put in a post tonight. Fat_Man, feel free to disagree, but I don't think I left anything out this time. Hopefully, what I typed in also jibes with what all the other sites say about how Palm does its licensing. I think PalmInfocenter talks a little about in its review of the 610N.
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09-19-2001 05:58 AM
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