Chris Phillips received a ton of reader mail about his excellent article, "The new Palm handhelds: faster, sharper, more expandable," in last month's issue of PalmPower at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200106/m500001.html. Here's a sampling of the great comments he received.

Picture problem
I totally loved your article on these new Palm handhelds. I own a Palm V upgraded to a Palm Vx myself, and I read the article on my handheld. I could hardly wait to take a peek at the pictures that were included, only to find out that they were useless. It was impossible to make out differences between the different devices. Please take new, better images and post them on the Internet. And don't worry if they take a while to load. I'm convinced there are more people than me who are interested in a fair comparison.

Best regards,
Bengt Carlsson

Chris Phillips responds
I'm glad you liked the article. It's always nice to hear from a satisfied reader.

I wish I could take better pictures. Unfortunately, the glare from the screens makes taking pictures very difficult. It was almost impossible to get any photos of the Palm m505 that didn't reflect either myself (looking straight down) or the ceiling (like the one in the article). I took a ton of pictures and could not get any of them to come out any clearer than the ones in the article. If you really want to compare the different color units, I encourage you to visit a local retailer. I did this a few days ago and was very impressed by the color on the Visor Prism. I hear the color on the CLIE is excellent, but I still haven't seen one in person.

Thanks for the feedback.

Color correction
I've just read your review of the Palm m505 in PalmPower. It seems that you may have missed an important point about the new color screen. While it is "capable" of displaying 65,000 (16-bit) colors, it actually only display's 256 (8-bit) colors in the built-in applications (Address Book, To Do List, etc). This is done to conserve battery life. It will be up to individual application developers to write code that will take advantage of all 65,000 colors.

Once some new applications start to appear, I am sure that the washed out look of the native screen will quickly become a thing of the past.

My Palm m505 should be here in a day or two when they arrive in Australia.

Richard Reeve
Jetech Pty Ltd.

Chris Phillips responds
I hope you are correct that the screen will not look as washed out when developers start writing applications in 16-bit. However, I'm not too optimistic. It reminds me of the days when color laptops were new. There was a difference between passive matrix displays and active matrix displays. The active matrix displays were much brighter and more vibrant. No matter how many colors you throw at a passive matrix display, it's still not as vibrant as an active matrix display. As in all things, time will tell the tale.