Handspring’s Visor Pro Bulks Up on Memory and Speed
A few months ago, I complained in this column that having a maximum of 8 megabytes of memory in a Palm OS device could really test your patience if you rely on your PDA to carry reference texts, databases and contact lists.
Handspring Inc. apparently was one step ahead. This month, the company introduced the $299 Visor Pro, which is equipped with 16 MB of memory and the Motorola Dragonball VZ processor, which the company says is “the fastest Palm OS processor” available.
By bulking up on memory and muscle, the Visor Pro becomes a very impressive device for personal and business use. The Palm operating system takes up little memory (the Visor Pro uses Palm’s 3.5 version OS and not the 4.0 version found on Palm’s latest models), leaving a tremendous amount of room for data.
For example, I loaded six months’ worth of appointments, more than 2,000 names from my contact list, 128 reminder notes and a reference book that weighed in at 381 kilobytes. After all that, I’d exhausted a mere 8% of the Visor Pro’s memory, leaving me tons of free space for other applications or more data. For example, the Pro can store 100 full-size 640-by-480-pixel color images, or a whopping 1,320 lower-resolution black-and-white snapshots.
The performance of the Visor Pro is snappy. The device also includes the “fast look-up” capability of more recent Visors. Press a combination of buttons on the bottom of the unit and you can “spell” various last and first names--using only one hand.
The Visor Pro uses a rather sharp monochrome display, a hallmark of Visor models. The monochrome display also draws less energy, extending the life of the unit’s built-in lithium-ion battery.
The typical Visor features are present: the Springboard slot that will accommodate any of 60-plus modules for communications, music, networking and so on; the microphone in the bottom for use with a snap-in phone module; and a connector for external keyboards.
Although 16 MB of memory doesn’t rival the memory in a laptop computer, the Visor Pro, coupled with a fold-out keyboard and wireless modem, offers one heck of an alternative for those who travel frequently.
At the same time, some features of the basic Handspring platform could use some updating. An optional travel charger is available, but it might be nice if there was a way to connect the power supply directly to the Visor Pro (something available on most Pocket PC models) to make traveling easier and to eliminate the need for buying a second charger. And though 16 MB of RAM is a great improvement, it would have been great to see Handspring adopt the same Secure Digital Memory Card format that Palm has used, which can add as much as 128 MB of memory.
But these are the days of short product cycles. Handspring isn’t talking, but it would not surprise me to see a model from the company that incorporates even more memory in the future. For now, this model is the one to get if you have a lot of data to carry around and want to lighten your load.
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Mark A. Kellner is a freelance technology writer and hosts “Mark Kellner on Computers” at https://www.adren alineradio.com from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursdays.
