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.

That's ok...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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!

woho!

[term_0z]

Woho, finaly you can play nethack in colors!

Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

640 colours ought to be enough for everyone...

Palm giving a refund?

[Anonymous Coward]

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? :)

reminds me of...

[Alien Being]

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."

Re:REFUND!! REFUND!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, great idea. Maybe you should work for Palm. You sound like you have a good business head on your shoulders.

if they plan on using palms to view their finances

[SirSlud]

I sure hope red is one of those 4096 colours ...

Re:That's ok...

[pytheron]

This would make doing a port of Hollywood Strip Poker Pro from the Amiga worthwhile :p

that is just plain wrong

[AssFace]

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.

Re:What does 58621 represent?

[Captain Large Face]

Close your eyes and hit your numeric keypad 5 times. You might be close then..

Re:12 bit?

[DrXym]

... and when questioned about the blending technique, Palm spokeswoman Marlene Somsak replied, "each palm ships with a frosted glass display. The inability to see individual pixels or whole words for that matter dramatically increases the number of colors the user perceives".

Upgrade your old Palm to 65,536 colors!!!

[timeOday]

My old Palm V was getting pretty outdated with its old 2-bit black and white display. But now, thanks to Palm's patented "blending" (or is it "spinning?") technology, I've been upgraded to 65,536 colors! That's right, by merely frosting the display (with sandpaper), I can no longer discern anything smaller than a 4x4 block of pixels, yeilding 2^(4*4) = 65,536* glorious colors**!

* No claim of uniqueness for each color is expressed or implied

** If Gray isn't a color, what is it?

Re:That's ok...

[Black Perl]

why can't Americans distinguish between THAN and THEN?

Your sooo write. I guess its because their to busy misspelling they're other homophones.

Re:12 bit?

[guttentag]

Color combinations, eh?

So if I have a 2-pixel by 2-pixel screen whose pixels display either black (on) or white (off), I can claim my screen supports 5 color combinations:

1. Black (4 black pixels)
2. Dark Grey (3 black, 1 white)
3. Quasi Grey (2 black, 2 white) -- The Margarine of Grey, not Grey enough
4. Light Grey (1 black, 3 white)
5. White (4 white)

That makes sense, if I've gone cross-eyed and can see only a big blur of the average of colors.

It *is* 16 bits!

[Anonymous Coward]

it's just that four of them are conveniently optimized to zero to enhance speed and the users viewing experience. This will be known as the patented PalmOS Visual SpeedBit(tm) Display Optimization.

And if you think that's good, just wait until next year: the current 4 bits of optimization will be extended to a whopping 12 bits, resulting in the new PalmOS 24-bit colour display.

Re:12 bit?

[stickyc]

"each palm ships with a frosted glass display. The inability to see individual pixels or whole words for that matter dramatically increases the number of colors the user perceives".

Where I come from, a similar effect is achieved with generous application of alcohol.

My people call the technique "Beer Goggles".

Obligatory Simpsons Reference

[floppy ears]

This reminds me of the Lionel Hutz flyer that says:

Works on contingency

No money down

And when the Simpsons question him on this he says it's a typo and adds punctuation so that it reads:

Works on contingency?

No, money down.

And then he adds, "And I shouldn't have this Bar Association logo here either ..."