The oddest thing about the Visor Prism is the color of its case, which Handspring describes as cobalt blue. I laughed when I took it out of the box because it's the same color as my old Iomega Zip drive. While I don't think I'll mistake the Visor Prism for a Zip drive, I think I'd describe it as "purple" rather than cobalt. Another difference is that the Visor Prism's power button is on the right side of the unit, rather than the left side (the way it was on all previous Visors).

The Visor Platinum
For those who want to stay with a monochrome display, Handspring's Visor Platinum is the Palm OS-based device to choose. The speed difference is really compelling. I'm going to have a tough time going back to my old Palm IIIx, even with over-clocking software. Case-wise, I think the Visor Platinum looks a lot cooler than the Visor Prism. I guess I prefer silver to purple, even though it's rather trendy.

So other than the exterior color, what makes the Visor Platinum so special? Well, if you were to consult the Handspring Web site, you'd learn that the Visor Platinum is an advancement over the Visor Deluxe in that it's "fast," "really fast," and "super speedy." What's more, the Visor Platinum "can organize your life really, really quickly," "has the very speed you need," and " can access all your data without the wait." You might be getting the impression it's supposed to be fast.

In fact, it's more than twice as fast as a standard Palm IIIx or Palm V, according to Neil Bridges' Benchmark application (at http://www.quartus.net/products/benchmark/). Benchmark measures the CPU (Central Processing Unit) speed and bus bandwidth utilization of your device relative to other devices on its scale. I also measured the Visor Prism's performance with Benchmark and discovered it came out a couple of percentage points faster than the Visor Platinum! But what are a few percentage points between friends? The final results for the Visor Prism are pictured in Figure D.

FIGURE D

The Visor Platinum measured a couple points behind the record-holding Visor Prism pictured here.

Note: I used an older version of Benchmark. The latest version, 2.0, adds the Visor Platinum to its table and uses the Palm IIIe and Palm IIIxe as the baseline devices.

Disappointments
I wish that Handspring would consider putting flash memory in their devices rather than ROM. I just put a TRG xtra xtra Pro in my Palm IIIx and really like the security the flash memory provides. Springboard modules are great, but you can't use the 8MB flash module at the same time you're using the modem module.

The biggest gripe I have with Handspring, however, is that their models ship with USB cradles by default. Once I've successfully performed a HotSync with a serial-connected Palm device on the only PC I own with a USB port, I've found it next to impossible to get any Handspring model to successfully HotSync via USB without having to reformat the PC's hard drive and reinstall the OS. Simply installing the Handspring version of Palm Desktop just doesn't suffice. Now, please, don't send me any flamage regarding operating systems. You're much better off in a newsgroup like alt.sysadmin.recovery if you want to discuss that sort of thing! If it were up to me, I'd just lower the price by $30 and have the end user purchase her own choice of cradle or HotSync cable as she sees fit.