By David Gewirtz
<<Yawn>>
So there's a new, iMac-styled Palm IIIe skin. Yippee. And there have been a few price reductions. Yowzah. And Handspring, that company we all had such high hopes for, came out with a Palm IIIe clone with incompatible connections and a slot. Be still my beating heart.
<<Yawn>>
Between these announcements and the prospects of an Al Gore vs. George W. Bush presidential race, our upcoming new millenium seems about as exciting as, well, Al Gore.
Fine, so we're not talking exciting. What do we really have here? Is there anything at all to care about? Honestly, that's a tough call. Let's look at Handspring first.
Handspring's handicap
As you may recall, Handspring is the company created by Palm founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky after they left 3Com last year. Handspring has announced two devices, the Visor and the Visor Deluxe. Both Visor devices are very similar to the Palm III series, except each supports an add-on port called a Springboard expansion slot. The Visor (without a cradle, interestingly) starts at $149 and is, for all intents and purposes, a somewhat incompatible (more on that later) Palm IIIe clone with 2MB RAM and a Springboard slot (more on this, too, if you keep reading). The Visor (with a cradle) is $179. The Visor Deluxe, priced at $249, has 8MB RAM, and is available in a series of funky colors including orange (not as nasty as it sounds), blue, green, white, and gray.
Software for the Visors is similar to what you'd get with a typical Palm device, although Handspring describes an enhanced Date Book (a few better views and better integration), a calculator with business, statistical, and scientific functions, and a world clock. See Claire Pieterek's review in this issue for more details.
Things begin to get somewhat interesting with the Springboard expansion slot. The downside is the Springboard interface is proprietary (or at least that's what it looks like on first glance). Therefore, all your PCMCIA cards won't work with this device and you're dependent on new developments for add-on devices. The company's press release claims available or under development modules include phones, pagers, global positioning systems, remote Internet access products, MP3 audio players, voice recorders, digital cameras, smart card readers, bar code scanners, and field data collection probes. The Springboard slot is also being used to deliver software, similar to the game cartridges of old. One such cartridge that's apparently available at launch is Tiger Woods Golf. Handspring's Web site lists an 8MB Springboard module (presumably, this would allow you to bring the Visor Deluxe up to 16MB), a modem module, a "backup module" (to aid in backing up Visors shipped without cradles), and the Tiger Woods game. Pricing on the modules is quite workable, with the backup module costing $39.95 and the 8MB module costing $79.95.
