Hands on a Handspring

The story is well documented. The inventors of arguably the most innovative gadget of the 20th Century (the Palm Pilot) clash with corporate America, jump ship and set out to build a better mousetrap. The result: The Handspring Visor.
While it has the same DNA as the original Palm, the hipper Visor has better genes. Most notably is its module expansion-docking bay feature. Designed primarily to combat "planned obsolescence" inherent in almost every digital doodad on the market, the expansion bay gives third party manufacturers the freedom to convert the Visor into any number of products.

At Visor’s launch the only module available was a crappy Tiger Woods golf game, leaving many to speculate whether the Visor had enough juice to compete with the mighty Palm. Today however, the availability of expansion modules from snap-on cell phones and GPS navigators to email pagers and Power Point presentation devices has proven that the visionaries at Visor knew what they were doing.

Kudos also go to Handspring for not cannibalizing the core features of the Palm. Instead, they took its unbeatable synchronization capabilities (which they invented) and super-charged it by adding USB connectivity. Make no mistake, the Palm and now Visor's ability to synchronize effortlessly with any computer is what won the electronic organizer war. Before PC synchronization, Sharp and Psion owned the organizer market. When the latter two, and even Microsoft's pitiful WindowsCE devices failed miserably to introduce easy synchronization software (I have two busted hard drives that can attest to this fact), the Palm Pilot with its one-button synch simply smoked the competition.

For Handspring the devil is in the details. Simple functions like an expanded Datebook feature for viewing your calendar/agenda, faster USB connectivity, and its ever-expanding module collection make it the best mousetrap in the crowded mobile PDA marketplace.