Comments on: Handspring Visor Pro Review

Do the jog dial, casing, and price mean that much?

(If you add a cradle and an 8mb memstick to the CLIE, you're almost up to the Pro's cost)

Well, except for RAM, right??

Seriously, 16 MB of RAM is a pretty dang compelling feature. Only wish Palm would have the guts to make an m505x or m510 or m515 with 16 BM of RAM (and slightly brighter backlighting).

I'm rapidly running out of RAM on my 8 MB Palm.

I think that this is the perfect handheld for Doctors. The databases that are available for Doctors eat RAM for breakfast. With the Pro, you can fill it up with Databases, and leave the Springboard slot available for a nice dictation device.

I say three cheers for Handspring. They take a lot of flak for being "boxy" and "dated", but if you look at most of the new handhelds out on the market now, most of them are utilizing handspring technology. (USB, 65K colors, etc...) Soon, we will see most handheld manufacturers shipping a model with 16mb of RAM. Good for Handspring for being the first out the door with this innovative product.

Doug

I've switched from a Philips Velo 500 (75 Mhz processor) with 16 Mb of RAM to a Palm IIIxe.

I am currently running the IIIxe at 10 MHz because I'm a tight Englishman, and it saves battery power. I used several PocketPCs (okay, not this one), including the 200+ MHz Casio E-115 devices, before opting for the much cheaper IIIxe. With four times the memory, a much faster processor, colour and rechargeables they are nice machines.

Unfortunately, battery performance is dismal. I'll get over ten days from my IIIxe (rechargeable batteries not alkaline AAAs), my boss used to get four hours from his Casio. Hmph.

Furthermore, the time taken to switch to the Contacts database and search for a contact (my database contains over 1100 entries) for the Casio is longer than the Palm IIIxe clocked at 10 MHz! I didn't believe that myself. Try running an Outlook search on a desktop then the same search on a standard Palm and the Palm wastes the 1 GHz desktop any time!

PalmOS is also easier to use. It doesn't multitask in the same way (okay guys, it's a simplistic statement, but you know what I mean) but that means you don't have to open eight (!) menus to close an application.

It'll be a nice machine to use if you want all the gizmos, but if you want an organiser with capabilities beyond the basic PIM, Palm's the one for me.

The first thing which told me to throw away those battery eaters was the thing that if i would like to use my PDA, like i did with palm os, i had to carry my cradle with me to disable the whining pocket pc going out of battery every 6 hours...

Tommi

For my own use, switching to the M505 (say) would bring me no additional benefit from my IIIxe. I use rechargeable batteries in the IIIxe, don't need colour, don't need the speed . . .

PDAs will always struggle with a small screen and small, poor quality speakers - I don't really see the point in being able to play AVI files! Yes, there may be a point in playing MP3s, but MP3 players are smaller and cheaper than a Palm / WinCE device. And, yes, I have heard some of the newer stereo WinCE devices . . . but their speakers remain tiny little things. Until they come up with some way of using a larger screen (folding design or something), heh, it's a gadget rather than some use.

Also another important point is that WinCE devices do cost more than Palms in the UK. If the price of two devices were similar, I'd look closer at it, but whilst PalmOS devices are cheaper, and offer no real benefit to me (in my own selfish world, I appreciate), PalmOS is for me.

One final point is that WinCE devices are still catching up with the OS - fitting faster processors and more memory. The OS has been written with high end applications in mind. This seems too much of a handicap for small devices given the current technology / cost barriers. Give it five years . . . maybe ten . . . until then, for me (and other users I know) the simplicity of the Palm's operating system wins us over - and the superior battery performance, too!

He said that Handspring, being a small company, needed to find a specific area in which they could excel, and gain an advantage over the larger companies.

They chose the springboard, which, for numerous reasons, has not succeeded (costs to much, small overall market, etc.)

They have now reexamined their position, and are moving to capture the PDA/phone combo market. He feels this is probably a good idea, but he also feels that, based on HandSpring's size,the won't have the resources to continue to expand thier Visor line while paying engineers to design the new Treo lines. AND, the Treo line is what can save their company, so YOU guess where they are going to direct their resources!

Based on the newest PDA's from Handspring, it's obvious that there was basically no need to assign ANY engineers to work on the Pro or Neo.All new features are basically old hat.

Please don't flame, I'm just passing on what I heard, and what I feel is a good summary of Handsprings situation to date.