The clamor for color Palms continues unabated, despite Palm Computing Inc trying to dampen down reports that it was preparing a color version of its best-selling PDA for release next year. The 3Com Corp company has been talking to its licensees – IBM Corp, Symbol Technologies Inc and Handspring Inc – at the Palmsource ’99 developers conference about color support. The company has been looking at the problems itself for some time and says that the drain on battery life, cost and possible increase in size of the devices are all factors behind its caution.
However, Jack Gold, head of the mobile and pervasive computing practice at Meta Group, thinks that Palm’s go-slow on color is as much a tactical decision as a technical one. The new Dragonball chipset [the 33MHz VZ] has color capability built in. Extending the PalmOS to support color should be trivial. However, having Palm deliver a color device is probably at least 6 months away. I expect they will deliver this in time to one-up Microsoft (coinciding with Microsoft’s new release of WinCE in the spring), he said. And Gold does not think a price rise would scare Palm’s customers: Most users, given a choice, would spend a little more for a color display (it really does add a significant amount of information and does enhance user interaction/experience). However, the key is getting a transflective color display that looks good in bright light (not just when backlit). These are becoming available, but are still fairly expensive.
