Swanky private school orders all the students to get PalmOS handhelds (cool!) and specs out the color IIIc (bad, bad bad). The clueless wonder at the school who picked out the spec sez “the color is a nice addition and it’s a relatively rugged design which is particularly suited for schools.” Damned crackhead. First of all, the Visor is way more rugged, easier to back up in the field when away from a PC, and cheaper. Color screens on PDAs are ass. Monochrome PDAs are reflective — the brighter the ambient light, the sharper the screen (when the ambient light is insufficient, you can turn on the backlight, but it stays off most of the time — a good thing in a battery-powered device!). The color PalmOS devices use a backlit screen — legibility is therefore a function of how much brighter the backlight is than the ambient light. That means that in order to be legible at high noon, your battery-powered device needs to put out more lumens than the sun. Since dead batteries in a PDA mean total, catastrophic data-loss, this is such a plainly bad idea that it makes my tripe writhe in outrage. It’d be cool if someone could invent a screen that could toggle between both modes, though no doubt there’s an Electrical Engineering techo-latin explanation as to why this is impossible. Link Discuss