Refurb: Cheap, heavy, thick way to get color; good unit
Written: Jul 04 '02 (Updated Jul 04 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap way to get color, totally compatible with Palm OS
Cons: Big and HEAVY
The Bottom Line: Older model, but still good. Total compatibility to Palm with a nice color, easy to read screen. But huge and heavy. Worth it because of price.
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| kfgecko's Full Review: Handspring Visor Prism Handheld |
We bought the factory refurbished Handspring Prism as an upgrade to my wife's Palm III (2MB) which she had outgrown. She insisted on color, even though color meant paying 2x the price on a similar powered black and white model. The Prism was a comprimise, and at $169, it was the cheapest way to get color, more memory, and a faster CPU. But we paid the price of huge, bulkiness.
FACTORY REFURBISHED: Special note, the one we bought is a "factory refurbished", and not a new model. That means that the Handspring factory somehow got a used model, polished up and retested it for factory specifications. There might be cosmetic blemishes, but our unit didn't have any. I, like most people, was hesitant to get a refurb since "you never know". My friend however had good luck with refurbs, and after seeing how this unit seems to be working flawlessly, getting something "new" as opposed to "factory refurbished" is more of a feely thing.
The Prism runs Palm OS and is completely compatible with all applications; well, I have hear reports of incompatibilities, but we experienced none. In fact, all the applications and data that was on the previous Palm transferred over and worked perfectly with the Prism. Upgrade was essentially painless. The baton has been passed from the old Palm to the Prism and my wife goes about her life with the Prism without a stall of any kind.
The Prism's 8MB of memory and faster CPU is a vast improvement over her Palm III. There is no onboard flash memory (which I employ on my Palm IIIx to increase its 4MB to a little more), which means that OS upgrades will have to come as patches which take up main memory. So far, we haven't found a need for any upgrades.
The Prism comes with DateBk+ (a cut down version of DateBk3) which is a vast improvement over the default Palm OS Datebook. It allows more views, week summaries, icon in month view, and various other improvements that Palm OS's original Datebook has been screaming for for years now. It is nice that this is included "in the box" with the unit as I found as a Palm user that the Palm PDA's really require several application upgrades to fit the need of the person, which easily stacks on another $100 to the purchase price.
The casing of the unit comes in a stylish and pleasant gunmetal blue. The four application and up/down buttons are of good quality and feel precise to push. Handspring has decided to put the on/off button on the right side, as opposed to Palm's left side, clearly as a move of differentiation from Palm. By holding down the on/off button, the "analogish" contrast slider control comes up. This, I'm told, is better than the Palm color version which doesn't have as much precise contrast level control.
The screen is bright and easy to read, with vibrant 16-bit colors. Unlike black and white Palms, which need strong over head lighting to see comfortably, the Prism's lit display is easier on the eyes. My wife said, "it's just like a laptop screen"; which it is, albiet much smaller. Some people complain about the pixelization (tendancy to notice the gridlike blockyness of each pixel on the screen), but we haven't noticed it at all. We feel it's quite a bit of improvement over the black and white screens.
The unit charges in its cradle which is optionally powered by a separate power cord. The battery is a rechargeable lithium ion battery which charges quickly (in a couple hours) and lasts about a week of regular use. The cradle connect via USB only, no serial is available in box. We used Handspring's version of Palm Desktop and synchronization with her iBook was no problem, other than the fact that there is no OS X support; which is immensely frustrating. That means that you must either use OS9, or boot OS9 in compatibility mode via OS X on the Mac. The Handspring Desktop seems to have improved backup of the Palm units, as now all apps and data are backed up during sync. For my Palm IIIx, I had to buy a separate application, BackupBuddy to accomplish this.
One of the free applications from Handspring which promotes usage of the color of the Prism, is the Photo album application which allows you to store color pictures onto the unit. Pictures like family, friends, pets, etc. The tiny 160x160 screen isn't the greatest for viewing real life pictures, but it works and is "cute" for that touchy feeliness. I'd advise to use a separate graphics program to resize your pictures to dimensions of less than 160 pixels. Although Handsprings program auto resizes the picture appropriately for the Prism, it does a horrible job. (My guess is that it's just doing decimation to accomplish the resize; for you techies.)
I noticed that games are "more fun" now that they're in color and that makes us use the unit a little more.
Our biggest complaint is the size and weight. This thing is huge. With dimensions at: 4.8" x 3.0" x 0.8", it's about 50% thicker than the original Palms (like Palm III) and about 3x thicker than the thin Sony Clie's. It's much heavier too, weighing in at 6.9 oz. We regret this part and it only serves to bulk up my wife's purse even more than it already is.
We don't know anything about the Springboard modules because we can't find any and aren't interested enough to look harder. But it's nice to know that the expansion slot exists for potential expansion.
Bottom line, we are happy with the unit, but loathe it's size and weight... especially the weight. It's a cheap way to get color and it's completely compatible with all our previous applications.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 169
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Epinions.com ID:
kfgecko
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Location: San Jose, California
Reviews written: 165
Trusted by: 10 members
About Me:
30-something male, born/raised in Northern-California.
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