They're splitting the company into Palm, Inc. (the hardware company) and PalmSource, which is the OS business. Of course, PalmSource is also the name of their tradeshow. Could it have been that hard to come up with a useful company name, like, oh, I don't know, how about The Palm OS Company?

The split might be a good idea. Figuring that it's harder to keep up in hardware than software, the Palm OS business could gain revenue from the licensees, while the hardware side of the business could simply keep cranking out hardware.

But where's the innovation? In comparison to Handspring's nearly 3G (third generation telephony) wireless, color Treo, Palm's clunky, black & white i705 is completely unlustworthy (and that's not even counting the fact that it doesn't have a phone).

In comparision to the Palm OS-based CLIE, which has full color, double the screen resolution, a built-in keyboard, a flip lid, and, oh yeah, an MP3 player, the Palm m505 is uninspiring.

The bad news keeps on coming.

"What's a bit or two of color resolution among friends?"

Could it be that the innovation resides in the high-resolution color screen of the m130? After all, this is a screen that purported to offer 16-bit color, the "more than 65,000 colors" that the company had been advertising since the product came out in March.

Just because Palm accidentally discovered that the m130 actually only supports 58,621 color combinations -- a situation brought to their attention by a lawsuit about it, that doesn't mean innovation has slowed. I mean, after all, what's a bit or two of color resolution among friends?

And now, just today, TechTV is reporting that the m130 really only supports 4096 possible colors per pixel, but there's a technique in the hardware that makes it appear to support 58,621 colors per pixel. Is it actually 4,096 colors or 65,000+ colors? And is it right to claim it kinda-sorta looks like 65,000 colors when you've cost-reduced it to only generate 4,096 colors?

By the way, that's a big difference. With 65K colors or so, you can see a decent color photograph without posterizing. With only 4,096 colors (including shades of colors, because each shade of a color is counted as a color in hardware implementations), photos of little Jimmy could look a lot more splotchy than you ever intended.

While Palm has acknowledged there's a difference between what it promised and what it delivered, Palm's Marlene Somsak said the company will "aggressively fight" the lawsuit, which was filed in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County.

Further, Somak said, "The company is working on a plan to compensate customers," but refused to say whether refunds were being considered. She did say replacements aren't part of the plan since the product isn't defective.

I guess that depends on how you define defective. If you buy a 6-cylinder car and get home and discover it's a 4-cylinder machine, is it defective? If you buy an 1.8GHz computer and get home and discover it only runs at 1GHz, is it defective? If you buy a computer with 512MB of RAM and get home and discover there's only 384MB, is it defective?