Seems like I've got some things mixed up, let's see.
In our experience the 6630 and 6680 do not have any problems with transparency, the 2 are infact considered near-compatibles.
I'm refering to bug 2.21 in the 2nd Edition Platforms Known Issues v2.9 pdf that affects S60 2nd Edition, FP2 and FP3, all S60 2nd Edition, FP2 devices, Nokia N90 (SW 2.0530.3.5). Now that I look at it again I realize that it concerns the Nokia M3G (JSR-184) implementation, and since Im not dealing with 3D i guess I shouldn't worry about it.
To my knowledge the 6600, 6630, 6680 ect do not leak memory on image creation. (unlike the 3650, and 7650 which leak loads).
My bad, I got that impression from a thread on forum.nokia.com. So the 3650 and 7650 are the only handsets with createImage problems?
Drawing images with drawRegion(with transforms) on the 6600 & 6630 will however leak memory, and will cause application slow-down and eventual crashes after a few 100,000 invocations. (less than a minute of application execution)
I'm not currently using drawRegion but does this leak affect other any functions, i.e. are there other functions (e.g. Sprite.paint or TiledLayer.paint) that uses drawRegion?
On a side note, Thread.yield() has issues on some handsets.
Thanks, I'll use sleep(), for 20-50ms as adviced in the Known Issues In The Nokia 6600 MIDP 2.0 Implementation pdf instead.
In general, I would suggest stearing well clear of getRGB & createRGBImage - it will almost certainly cause you no-end of compatability issues.
A superior alternative would be to perform the color filtering before the png is created - operating on the PLTE chunk of the raw png data.
This will be alot faster (as you will be able to operate on the palette directly), and will not be prone to any device issues. (in the vodafone drop list, there isn't a single handset that doesn't support transparency in png images)
The png format is simple to manipulate, and well documented - it should not take more than a few days to implement what you are wanting.
I believe we already have some code to do modulation of png palettes (for colorizing monochrome graphical fonts), unfortunately, its not my IP, so I can't simply give it away. (and certainly not for comercial purposes

)
Im going to take your advice and stay clear of createRGBImage and getRGB, they really seem to cause nothing but problems. Apart from the max 4k pixels bug on Nokia 6600 this method will result in a considerable heap usage peak which will make lots of older handsets run out of memory.
I had a brief look at the official png specification at
http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG/ a while back and it seemed like it would take some time to figure out how the modify the PLTE chunk and fix the CRC and such. So if you have any links to threads, articles or tutorials on that it would be really appreciated. As for the color manipulation bit, there are lots of code and pseudo code available that converts RGB to HSL and vice versa but they are all using floats which is not supported by the J2ME. But I don't think that will be so much of a problem and I'll make sure I'll post the integer RGB<->HSL functions here when they're done in case anyone else is interested. Making a commercial game doesn't mean you can't share your code or ideas with other developers, just that you try and earn some money in the process. We are actually discussing if we should distribute the games for free on our website in addition to the commercial distribution.
Thanks for the response!