We’ve picked up some interesting news on color Palm devices. Specifically, the following documentation, available on the Palm Web site, talks about Palm OS 3.5 supporting 1, 2, 4, and 8-bit color and grayscale. 8-bit color allows pictures to have up to 256 colors, suitable for games, but not quite up to the task of displaying photos or video. Here are Palm’s statements:

The most major and obvious change in Palm OS software 3.5 is the graphics system, which now supports 1, 2, 4, and 8 bit color and grayscale. Not all hardware running 3.5 can support all of these graphics modes, but for example 4-bit grayscale (16 shades) is possible and is officially supported on some devices running the DragonBall EZ, such as the Palm V device family.

There are new API functions to fully support color and grayscale, as well as new API routines to address limitations of the previous APIs – for instance WinGetPixel and WinSetPixel, routines long requested by developers, now have been created.

The preliminary 3.5 SDK contains some early documentation on the new graphics system, and the 3.0 version of the Palm OS Emulator supports emulating a color screen, so with the 3.5 color rom image developers can start creating color applications immediately, without having to wait for a device manufacturer to ship actual hardware.