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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mang Cheng who wrote (1617)	9/8/2000 5:06:18 PM
From: Win-Lose-Draw	Respond to of 6784

But a phone screen text displaying lines are fixed and you can't display graphics on a normal phone screen. Sure you can! In fact I'm looking at an ATT logo on my cell right now. When I log on to EBay using my phone browser, I get the EBay logo. Text, after all, is just a graphic with a very specific meaning. The reason my phone's screen doesn't go all squishy when you touch it is that it's under plastic and you aren't actually touching the screen. Like on a Palm. There are types of LCD where you can't really do graphics. An example would be old-style calculators where the screen didn't have dots, it had segments. But it's been a while since I've had a phone with a screen like that. One way to tell is if your phone supports a zillion languages/alphabets, like most Nokias. If the same screen can support cyrllic and latin alphabets, it's almost certainly a graphics-capable LCD.

To: Mang Cheng who wrote (1617)	9/8/2000 5:49:19 PM
From: Alski	Respond to of 6784

Well mang, on the LCD terminology thing you are wrong. Those cell phone, and calculator screens are LCD's. LCD refers to the underlying technology that makes them work. Those displays you don't want to call LCD's are just very low resolution LCD with few, large elements. Your definition of LCD screens: "LCD screens are those liquid-dy screens that you can depress with your fingers and it flows like liquid," isn't a "proper" definition, it just describes one of many types of LCD screens. The small, low resolution LCD's are a lot cheaper than the big, high resolution ones for a lot of reasons. I think they generally come from different niche suppliers too. You are right, though, that they are very different things with very different supply/demand/cost structures. But they are all LCD's. FWIW...Alski

To: Mang Cheng who wrote (1617)	9/8/2000 5:54:49 PM
From: Daniel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6784

LCD screens are those liquid-dy screens that you can depress with your fingers and it flows like liquid. That is only if the cover is thin enough to bend. (Try pressing on an LCD digital watch. That won't usually affect the display.) LCD screens can actually function the same way as a computer CRT terminal in the sense they are made up of some tiny dots and you can program the lcd screen to display any graphics you want - text is just one type of graphics. It can have a uniform array of small dots, but that's not what makes it an LCD. But a phone screen text displaying lines are fixed and you can't display graphics on a normal phone screen. That just means that it's not a graphics display; it doesn't mean that it's not an LCD. (In fact, consider digital watch displays again: most make digits out of large segments (as opposed to dots), but they are still LCDs.) Daniel

To: Mang Cheng who wrote (1617)	9/9/2000 10:18:18 AM
From: TechieGuy-alt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6784

WLD, I looked very carefully at the cell phone screens and I can't convince myself that they are LCD screens. LCD screens are those liquid-dy screens that you can depress with your fingers and it flows like liquid. LCD screens can actually function the same way as a computer CRT terminal in the sense they are made up of some tiny dots and you can program the lcd screen to display any graphics you want - text is just one type of graphics. But a phone screen text displaying lines are fixed and you can't display graphics on a normal phone screen. That's one reason why it's extremly difficult for cell-phone to imitate Palm since it's just not capable of displaying anything other than the few line of texts. Whereas Palm can imitate a cell phone screen without any effort. That's why Symbian wants to use the Palm interface (the LCD programmable display) to lay on top of the text-based Epoc OS and issues commands to run the cell-phone. I am no expert in these areas so any discussion is welcome. Maybe I could be totally wrong. Most (that I have seen) cellphone displays are LCD's. IT doesn't matter if the the screen can display graphics or not. That is an issue of the LCD being "dot-matrix" type or not. Only the old Motorola screen were non LCD, and it was quite obvious, the numbers were luminiscent. BTW, the fact that you can touch and scribble on the PAlm displays is NOT a function of the LCD screen, rather a digitizer overlay on the screen. Don't let (varied) functionality fool you into thinking a type of technology is something else. TG