Best yet...
Written: Dec 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Color screen, 8MB RAM, USB cradle, Springboard slot
Cons: Pricey, more bulky, screen can be hard to read outside
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| swangner's Full Review: Handspring Visor Prism Handheld |
I'll start my review by saying that I received my Prism for free, so I can't really comment much on the $449 list price (although I do think that has to come down at least $50 for it to be truly competitive in the marketplace). Having said that, this is probably the best PalmOS unit I've owned, and I've just about owned them all (Pilot 5000, PalmPilot Pro, PalmIII, PalmV). The color screen is truly impressive. It can be a bit hard to see in daylight, but I purposely brought it outside to test this. If you put the brightness control all the way up, it's acceptable. Most people are probably going to be using it mainly inside anyway.
PROS:
8MB of RAM is very nice. All of the Palm units I've owned before this had less (512K-2MB). It's pretty cool to not have to worry about memory when considering putting an extra application, pictures, or a book on the unit.
USB - a big step forward. Much faster than serial.
Springboard Slot - also nice. The only one I have so far is the backup module, but this promises to be great for expandability, and is much better than clipping accessories onto the bottom of the unit like Palm's models. A quick word about the Springboard backup module - awesome! One-touch backup/restore of the entire 8MB of memory for $40 - how can you beat that? It'll pay for itself the first time you have to do a hard reset away from your hotsync cradle (not that I've had to hard-reset the Prism even once in the 3 weeks I've been using it).
Color - simply blows the PalmIIIc away. Photos in 16-bit color are realistic, in 8-bit (like the IIIc) they are not. Now we just need more applications that support color, but you can't blame Handspring for this.
NEUTRAL:
Internal Rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery - while I love having an internal rechargeable battery (no more buying AAA's!), there are 2 downsides - battery life (the active matrix color screen simply eats battery power - you can get a 2 or 3 days of heavy use out of it at most), and the fact that you need the hotsync cradle to recharge it, which will be another piece of stuff you'll have to carry if you're going on a trip.
CONS:
Price - at $449, it costs almost as much as a Windows CE device, and a good $100 - $200 more than Palm units. Handspring needs to bring the price down to about $350-$400 to make it truly competitive in the marketplace
Size - it's considerably bigger than a Palm V/Vx, and slightly bigger than a Palm III/IIIc/VII.
Outdoor use - you have to crank the brightness all the way up to the maximum to be able to use it in sunlight, and this takes a toll on the battery.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
swangner
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Member: Stephen Wangner
Location: Hicksville, NY
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 1 member
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