Color Palms: Worth the Price?

This week Palm adds color to its line of personal digital assistants. But for $449, are 256 colors enough to make the jump?

The Palm IIIc resembles the Palm III, but has a color screen. It runs on a 20-MHz Motorola Dragonball processor with 8MB of memory. Its bright display lets users view images, play games, and read text easily. PC World took a close look at it, along with the upgraded operating system (see "Palm Gets Color, OS Upgrade," link at right).

The Palm IIIc offers 8-bit color with 160-by-160 pixel resolution, which is not great for photos. The IIIc's color range is limited by the fact that the device maintains the small unit size and long battery life typical of Palm products.

"The Palm IIIc is a baby step [towards color]," says Diana Hwang, research director of handheld devices at International Data Corporation. "Palm's color implementation doesn't use the full range."

In contrast, Windows CE-based devices, like the Casio Cassiopeia and Hewlett-Packard Jornada 430se, support 65,000 colors and high-resolution images, but have shorter battery lives.

The Palm IIIc runs continuously for 10 hours, or for about two weeks with intermittent use. Its lithium-ion battery recharges in the Hotsync cradle. Competitive color devices running Windows CE claim around 5 hours of use (less for multimedia functions) and don't charge in the syncing cradle.

Color in a Monochrome World

A color Palm is only as useful as its applications.

Bundled with Palm IIIc is Album to Go, a photo-sharing application from Club Photo; a color version of AvantGo's Web content service; a backgammon game; and a color calculator. Another 20 to 50 games and business applications are being readied by developers according to Paul Osborne, a product manager at Palm Computing.

Only a dozen or so of the 350 Web sites provided to Palm through AvantGo's Web content service support color for handheld PCs. Palm's device may inspire more Web sites to support color on handhelds, says Stuart Read, vice president of marketing at AvantGo.

Hardware vendors are also adapting to the color Palm. Kodak's PalmPix digital camera and Rand McNally's upcoming Streetfinder 2000 take advantage of the new model.

The IIIc is not compatible with some peripherals for other Palm devices, including the wireless modem service from Novatel and Omnisky. However, the IIIc works with the standard modems designed for the III series.