The Springboard slot
The biggest change is the Springboard slot on the back. As you can see in Figure E, it resembles the memory board door that was a fixture on the Pilot and PalmPilot, but offers almost unlimited potential. Unlike the expansion slot in the Palm IIIx, the Springboard slot is an open standard, freely downloadable, with no licensing fees or royalties.

FIGURE E


The Springboard slot resembles the memory board door on earlier Palm devices. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Springboard modules that will ship in October include Handspring's Backup Module, designed for Visor users who are away from or do not wish to sync with their PC, an 8Mb Flash Module, and a 33.6 kbps Modem Module, plus EA Sports' Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf module.

Other announced Springboard modules range from Airtrak Technologies' One-Way Pager, MarcoSoft's Streetrak Integrated GPS, Sycom's Voice Recorder, and Innogear's MiniJam MP3 Player and InfoMitt pager.

The nicest part about Springboard modules is that no external drivers are needed, and they truly install and uninstall themselves (unlike the aptly-nicknamed "plug 'n' pray" found in a certain desktop operating system). Remove the Springboard slot cover, pop the module in, and it installs the software or hardware automatically. Pop the Springboard module out, and your Visor is returned to its former state. The process is transparent to you -- you'll barely notice it even happened.

What the Visor doesn't have...
With all of the attention to detail that Handspring has put into the Visor, you'd think you'd get a decent stylus. Unfortunately, that isn't so. The Visor stylus is a cheap plastic stylus that looks very much like the original Pilot stylus. No metal, no reset pin--just a black plastic stick.

I admit that I've been spoiled by the Palm III family's metal/plastic stylus and the great third party styli that are available, like my favorites from TTools, PDA Panache, and PGHQ, to name a few.

Neither one of the Visor models offers flash memory as part of the device itself. Handspring's rationale is that there hasn't been a great deal of demand driving OS upgrades, and that people tend to upgrade hardware sooner than they are likely to want or need an OS upgrade. I find this somewhat disappointing, because I like to have the ability to put third-party applications I depend on in flash, which is very easy to do with TRG's FlashPro utility. TRG's version of the FlashPack utility also lets me put copies of databases into flash so I have a nearly-full backup on board if I should have to do a hard reset. I wasn't able to try out the Flash Memory Springboard module, so I'm hoping the associated software offers similar characteristics.

All in all, the Visor seems like a nice product, but it's definitely evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.