The Screen

The screen is cool. It's hi res. If you're old school, particularly old-school Apple ][, "hi res" means something special to you. "lo res" is what the fourth grade kiddies use in their BASIC programming class. "hi res" is for the good stuff. The good games, particularly.

Fortunately for today's programmers, using the N710C's high res mode is a bit more straightforward than the ol' Apple ][ high res...

Reflective Screens

It's great to finally have a reflective color screen. It's true that a IIIc screen can be turned up so bright as to almost hurt your eyes, and it is also true that the colors on the IIIc and Prism screens pop. But if it's a nice day out, and you're at lunch, and there's a bit of a wait to get seated, you'll probably be waiting outside enjoying the sun. In this situation, your IIIc and Prism screens do something very odd - they become completely black.

That backlight that was so bright inside is no match for that mass of incandescent gas, that giant nuclear furnace, known as the sun. But with a reflective color screen such as the one in the N710C and Palm M505, that huge atom-smashing machine becomes the best front-light in the whole solar system. You may statistically be inside most of the time you would want to use your Palm, but if you really need some info off your Palm on a nice sunny day, it's nice to be able to get it!

Sony's High Res Implementation

Sony's implementation of the high resolution mode was, in the unanimous opinion of Red Mercury Labs, done very well. The new high resolution function calls are implemented as a parallel API to the standard Palm OS user interface functions. For example, to draw a bitmap, you normally call WinDrawBitmap. On the N710C, you can still call WinDrawBitmap - but your pixels will automatically be doubled, since the API knows that if you're calling WinDrawBitmap, you probably are assuming a 160x160 screen. So, if your app really wants to draw that bitmap as-is, it has to call HRWinDrawBitmap. This is a bit messy, and undoubtedly there will be masses of programmers groaning at first sight of this, but when you sit down to think about it, there really wasn't a better way.

Old applications can run with "High Resolution Assist", essentially running in high resolution mode without any modification, and new applications can do full high resolution mode without learning a whole new API.

High Res Standard?

So we think the high resolution was handled well... except that one quick glance at the Palm OS landscape shows a bit of confusion. It all seemed crystal clear in early 2001... Sony would add high resolution, Palm and Sony would integrate the new API into OS 4.0, and then all Palm OS licensees would migrate to 320x320 high resolution. Things started to get a bit murky when a company named Handera announced its decision to add their own high res API to their Palm OS devices - but they chose to go with a resolution of 240x320. This might seem like the sky is falling and that the Palm OS is heading for disaster, but in reality, Handera has already announced that this 240x320 business is their ball and they're going home. It will be on their units only. Expect 320x320 to become the Palm OS screen standard resolution, and expect Sony's high resolution work to become a standard part of the Palm OS available to all licensees in the next year or so. This is all speculation on our part, but if you add everything up, there isn't really any other likely outcome. This is also exactly how 16 bit color was added to OS 4.0 - Handspring did the dirty work, they got an exclusive for a while with the Prism, then it became available to all licensees.

Hey, What About The Audio?

We haven't really touched on audio at all here, mainly because our pre-production unit didn't come with the software necessary to load music on to the N710C, nor did it come with a Magic Gate memory card, also required. So we really can't comment, except that it appears that we will be able to make use of this sound hardware in... you guessed it... games! The sound hardware can play back sampled, compressed audio, so of course the guys down in Red Mercury Labs are hard at work throwing new sound effects around. For you audio buffs, note that the sound hardware in the N710C does not have any synthesis that we know of, so all sound effects will basically be sampled audio, potentially pitch and volume modulated. For those of you who aren't audio buffs, it just might mean that the size of games with lots of sound effects will be a bit larger... but that's what memory sticks are for.

And the rest...

There are plenty of sites discussing the Japanese released N700C, and there will probably be hundreds of reviews on the N710C, so we'll let everybody else comment on the rest of the unit. If you haven't already guessed, the screen alone is going to make this the unit of choice around Red Mercury for a while. If we can get Omnisky on a memory stick radio modem one of these days, well, we might have some used Palm Vx's for sale soon...

More Information

For more information about high resolution mode, pixel doubling mode, running older applications in high resolution, and Red Mercury's support for high resolution, see these pages:

Performance
Technical Info
Our Impressions (You Are Here)
N710C Screen Shots
Red Mercury Games Screen Shots

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