Handspring Visor

The Handspring Visor Palmpilot lookalike

Sales pitch from when it was new

The Handspring Visor is the first expandable handheld computer. It comes with 2 MB of RAM, so you have more than enough room to store all your data.

With your Visor handheld, you will no longer have trouble getting to meetings and appointments on time, remembering people names and personal details, or keeping track of all the items on your to do list. The Visor handheld can help you improve your track record in allthese areas, both at work and at home.

Information

Handspring, an offspring (!) from Palm/USRobotics/`3COM in 1999, basically took the Palmpilot design and made some small changes to it. The biggest change was the introduction of an expansion-port where you could put “Springboards”, proprietary expansion modules. It also featured some enhancements to the Palm OS, including a better addressbook and “City times”. The 2MB “Solo” model featured on this page was later followed by the 8MB Visor Deluxe and slightly faster Platinum, the Prism featuring a color display, the slim Edge the lower-priced Neo and finally the 16MB Visor Pro that unlike the previous models had a built-in rechargable batter. Visor Pro was the last “pure” PDA from Handspring. It was followed by the Treo line of more communications-centric organisers. In 2003 Handspring “re-merged” with Palm to help further develop Treo combined phones and PDAs.

Software

The Handspring Visor featured a slightly enhanced version of Palm OS. The enhancements consisted of an enhanced datebook, a city time application, and an advanced calculator. Of course, as it was based on Palm OS, literally thousands of applications were available from the Internet as downloadable files. Considering the limited amount of memory available, it was amazing how much you could actually perform with these.

Addon hardware

Several add-on hardware modules were available at the time, see section about Springboard modules below. There were also addon full-sized keyboards like the GoType keyboard and other hardware items.

Springboard modules

The following text is borrowed from, Whim internet magazine thanks!

The most distinguishing attribute of the Visor is the expansion slot on the back. This expansion slot, much like the slot on a Nintendo GameBoy, has all kind of little goodies that can be inserted into it. MP3 players, modems, beepers, back memory modules and GPS satellite locators are among the host of add-ons with which Visor is able to work. All the expansion devices are hot swappable, meaning you can put it in and pop it out without having to turn off the device, and all are designed to work seamlessly with the Palm operating system without having to install additional drivers.

Personal notes

None yet.

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