Palm Computing's popular handheld computers will come with color screens next year, although such displays still raise design and battery-life issues. Palm has been working on a color-screen device for months and will deliver it by the first half of 2000, said Michael Mace, chief competitive officer for Palm, at the PalmSource 99 conference here today. The conference is Palm's annual meeting of hardware and software developers.
Color represents the next big thing for the handheld community.
With color, the devices will move closer to desktop-PC quality. But such screens have been a dream deferred for Palm users so far. Color-screen handhelds based on recent versions of Microsoft's scaled down Windows CE operating system came out earlier this year. Issues surrounding battery life, weight, display readability, and the supply of screens to make the new devices prompted Palm to take a more tentative approach. In retrospect, caution worked in the company's favor.