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I love my Handspring Visor. It runs PalmOS and does all the neat crap I need it to do. For $150 it’s one of the more useful things I have. It’s also sturdy enough to be durable, which is more confidence than the Palm models inspire in me. And I like Handspring as a company. They make a Visor called Platinum which is a faster Visor with more memory, and a Visor called Prism which is a Platinum with color. Were I to buy a new one I would get the Prism. The other selling point to a Visor (though unused so far on my model) is the springboard – a cartridge slot with which you can expand the unit to do any number of things.

However, Handspring decided to come out with a Visor called Edge. Its gimmick was that it was slimmer than a standard Visor – so much so that you couldn’t use the springboards – the main gimmick of the Handspring line – without an adapter. It sold disasterously, most (including Handpring) believing it had to do with the fact that it wasn’t color.

Now Handspring is coming out with two new Visors, the Pro and Neo. Neo is basically the Platinum repriced and with three diffrerent translucent cases. Pro is Platinum but with 16MB of RAM, unprecedented on a PalmOS device (PalmOS can’t address more than 8MB simultaneously, so either it’s a modified PalmOS or there’s a switching trick involved). Neat, but they’e still not color. Not that I’m in the market for a new PDA anytime soon – I still hold to the notion that they’re only for organizing and my bottom-rung PDA does just fine with that – but whenever I buy a new PDA it’s going to have color. I hope Handspring figures that out and these things get affordable soon.