Palm Computing finally responded to Palm users' most frequently made request, yesterday, when it pledged to release a Palm handheld with a colour screen during the first half of 2000. The announcement was made at the PalmSource developers conference by one Michael Mace, Palm's chief competitive officer, whatever the heck that is. We can only assume he's simply more ambitious than the company's other executives. Palm's promise was, of course, widely anticipated following Monday's launch of Motorola's latest Dragonball CPU, the 33MHz VZ. The new chip, due to ship early next year, is the first to integrate colour LCD and touchscreen control technology onto the die, allowing Palms to ship with colour screens but without extra motherboard logic. Still, Mace admitted the colour Palms would be larger than the current monochrome devices, but not, he promised, as big as Windows CE machines, which have offered colour for some time. Palm won't give an exact ship date for the new Palms, but the February/March timeframe is the company's traditional launch point for new models, and that would tie in very neatly with the anticipated volume shipments of the Dragonball VZ. ®