Palm Ships With 12-bit Screen, Says 16-Bit On Box 326
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.
Sounds to Me Like a Job for the FTC... (Score:3, Interesting)
I do believe reading a quote from Tim where he said that the FTC will not tolerate companies not living up to their promises and misrepresenting their products.
I'll be very curious to learn if we get any FTC action on this.
.sig - Would not a Microsoft employee, by any other name, smell the same?
Vortran out
Re:Poor Service (Score:2, Interesting)
The appearance of doing the right thing, they save some money, and maybe the coupons will get circulated to someone who doesn't have a PDA, thereby getting a potential customer away from Handspring or HP...
Original pics (Score:4, Interesting)
And, yeah, I do have a Palm M130. My partner recently bought a re-con Handspring at Fry's and I was amazed at the qualitative difference of the tro screens .... *grr*
Blending techniques (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if those blending techniques amount to bleed from one pixel to another, and it's actually poor quality and the user's eyes that are doing the blending.
I imagine those SAME blending techniques would yield 65536 x 65536 colors in 16-bits, and so they are actually significantly more than 99% off the specification.
ok, graphics geeks... factor 58,621. You get 31 x 31 x 61. Looks like 5-bits, 5-bits, and 6-bits, blended. I'm wondering how they came up with that number of colors! Any ideas?
Re:Sounds to Me Like a Job for the FTC... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it is about time to file a complaint [ftc.gov] with the FTC and see what they think of Palm and this misleading advertising.
What does 58621 represent? (Score:3, Interesting)
16 bit color would be 32*32*64.
12 bit color would be 16*16*16.
When they refer to color combinations, they can't be possible color values for adjacent pixels - that would be a huge number.
Any ideas?
Screen resolution limits colors? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Poor Service (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Excuse me? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because Palm took a universally-understood benchmark -- bit depth in colour -- and advertised an incorrect value. That's either incompetence or dishonesty. Then, when caught, they suddenly want to redefine the universally-accepted benchmark into something that is more palatable to them but incomprehensible to everyone else.
Both the original error/lie and the spin are designed to obfuscate and make it harder to make a rational, intelligent decision. This, to me, implies that even Palm feels it cannot compete on a level playing field... which is why Palm is off my list for my next handheld.
Re:Wired just swallowed the bait.. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's just plain BS on Palm's part.
Re:take action (Score:4, Interesting)
Otherwise they might just think "Well, we already lost everyone who we're going to lose with this, why bother changing now if we aren't going to get them back by changing, and we're not going to lose anyone else by staying course?"
I think you've got to give them the benefit of the doubt (if they back off and do what you think is right) and write it off as something that some marketing schmutz made a mistake on that the company doesn't stand behind. On the other hand if you think this 12-bit thing is an example of a systemic Palm, Inc. problem, then you need to site other examples that back up your idea, rather than just blaiming it all on this one issue.
"tricky language" (Score:2, Interesting)
What gets me is when they have to fall back on mentioning dithering -- the process of using *multiple* pixels to simulate an intermediate color. I hope they are doing this in hardware and not relying on Palm developers to do it for them.
I think that people are interested in "bits per *pixel*." If 3Com wants to say "5 *effective* bits per pixel," (because they're using hardware-based pixel-flipping techniques) then I think that's acceptable. But if you're going to avoid mentioning pixels and start talking about "color combinations," then I think they've crossed the line of common sense and are trying to be deceptive. We don't care about how many possible colors we can display using 4 pixels -- we want to know how many we can display using *1 pixel*!