Handspring's Visor Line Gains Color, Options

Handspring extends its personal digital assistant line this week, introducing two Visors that look toward video and wireless communications.

Available Monday from Handspring.com, the Visor Platinum and the color Visor Prism boost performance by using a version of the latest Palm OS 3.5 as well as a faster 33-MHz Motorola Dragonball VZ processor. Handspring optimized Palm OS 3.5 for additional color and USB support.

A grayscale device, the $300 Platinum Visor supports 16 shades of gray and has 8MB of memory. Handspring's first color device, Visor Prism costs slightly more than the competing Palm IIIC at $450, but has a 16-bit active matrix display, compared to Palm 8-bit color. (For a review of the Visor Prism, see "Handspring Gets Colorful.")

With its new metallic-colored devices, Handspring is offering solid product line expansion for high-end customers. The original Visor targeted frugal PDA buyers. Unfortunately, the packaging of the new devices isn't as sophisticated as their internal workings.

Boosting the Palm OS

Current Visors run Palm OS 3.3 and are not upgradable to 3.5 because Handspring tweaks the OS to support its Springboard expansion slot and USB. Handspring representatives say they've again improved on the Palm OS.

"Palm OS 3.5 supports 8-bit color," says Greg Shirai, product line manager at Handspring. "Developers said that wasn't deep enough, so we bumped it up to support 16-bit [color], or 65,000 colors."

With 16-bit color, Springboard modules like the IDEO Eyemodule camera become much more valuable, Shirai adds. "IDEO will offer a free software upgrade for color devices."

Some analysts see Visor Prism's display as less than enticing compared to the impressive color LCD on the Compaq IPaq Pocket PC.

"The color display on Prism is pretty much same one as you see on Palm IIIC," says Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner. "The Compaq screen, which comes from Sony, set a new benchmark for color displays. Users won't settle for less."

Besides color, Palm OS 3.5H--Handspring's version of the OS--also supports 16 shades of gray. That means even the grayscale Visor Platinum has better video and game performance than current Visors, Shirai says.