Battery Usage
This is probably the most important thing
that Palm and Handspring has to get right before adding color. Palm
OS users have become accustomed to having their batteries last a month
or more. Palm and Handspring have to find a way to get their color
organizers to come pretty close to this. Expect to see the Lithium
Ion battery in color organizers.
Picture courtesy of PalmStation.
Operating System Changes
The core Palm OS programs - Mail, Address
Book, Date Book, Memo, and To Do List - have not changed much since the
first Pilot came out. These programs would obviously have to change
to fully utilize color. Here are some screenshots from Palm OS 3.5,
the first version to utilize color. One can only hope that the programs themselves have utilized color this
nicely. Hopefully Palm Computing will add some advanced text editing
capabilities like multiple fonts (bold, italic, underline) into the operating
system. Third-Party programs will also need to be written to take
advantage of the new operating system. Early versions of Palm OS
3.5 were made available to attendees at PalmSource
’99, so there should be plenty of lead time for companies to write
color-enabled applications.
When? >>
