Handspring Gets Colorful

In the latest skirmish of the ongoing battle of the Palm OS-based personal digital assistants, upstart Handspring scores with its first color offering, the Visor Prism. It's slightly more compact and has a nicer-quality color display than Palm's competing Palm IIIc. However at $449, the Prism is also a hefty $120 more expensive than the newly-reduced IIIc (which, until the day the Prism launched, sold for $399).

Correction: The paragraph above was modified on October 19, 2000. --Editors

Size First

From a head-on view, the Visor Prism is almost indistinguishable from its monochrome counterparts, the Visor, Visor Deluxe, and Visor Platinum (which is also shipping Monday ). The Prism comes with 8MB of RAM and runs version 3.5.2H, a Handspring variant of the Palm operating system.

The only visible differences from the monochrome models are the color of the chassis (the Prism's slate-blue hue isn't available on the other models, nor can you choose any of the original Visor's translucent colors for the Prism) and the positioning of the on-off button on the lower right rather than the lower left; Handspring says this seemingly minor cosmetic change allowed it to preserve the original Visor's footprint. However, turn the unit sideways and you'll notice that, at just over three-quarters of an inch, it's a smidge thicker than a conventional Visor. At 6.9 ounces, the Prism is only a scant 1.5 ounces heavier than its siblings--a difference you can hardly feel. The Palm IIIc weighs a tad less (6.8 ounces) and is slightly thinner than the Prism, but its overall footprint is somewhat larger.

One other matter: We wish the Prism came with a flip-up lid, or a removable lid, to protect the screen (as do the Palm and other Visor models). But with so many flip-open cases around, that omission is hardly a fatal flaw.

The Visor Prism's backlit color screen shines a tad less brilliantly than the Palm IIIc's in a side-by-side comparison. But while the Palm supports 256 colors, the Prism offers a display that supports 65,000-plus colors. For many applications, the increased (16-bit) color depth won't matter at all, but if you plan to use your PDA to store photos or videos, you'll get better-looking images with the Prism. Out of the box, the Prism has color support in its calculator and CityTime world time map.