REVIEW: Visor Platinum

By anders pearson 09 Feb 2001

i got my Visor Platinum this last monday and have been playing with it continuously ever since.

i’ve never owned a PDA before (unless you count the little electronic addressbook that i won on trivia night a couple years back. i don’t) so i really don’t have much experience to compare it to. i should also mention that i am, by nature, a very unorganized person (i nearly failed out of my junior high math class not because i found the material hard (quite the opposite) but because i kept forgetting to turn in my homework (i did it; it just never occurred to me to actually hand it in so it could be graded)), so it’s probably about time i got one of these things to try to straighten my act out.

first off, it really is nice looking. the visors in general aren’t quite as aesthetically designed as the palm V’s but that metallic finish actually works for it. physically, it’s very well engineered; all the details are taken care of. the plastic cover snaps on over the back when it’s not guarding the screen, the buttons have depressions so you can hit them easily with the stylus, the tip of the stylus screws off to reveal a little pin that will let you hit the reset switch, and the other end of the stylus screws off to reveal a micro screwdriver just in case you feel like taking the damn thing apart while you’re at it. overall it feels solid; the weight is just enough that it’s comfortable without really being particularly heavy.the leatherette case it comes with is basically useless though; it’s difficult to slide the visor out of it with one hand and it doesn’t have any sort of belt clip or other mechanism to attach it to anything. all it seems to do is keep the plastic shell from getting scratched (like i really care). so i’ll probably buy a decent holder for it soon.

everyone i’ve talked to has told me, and now i finally have to agree: palmOS is really easy to use and very well designed from a UI perspective. they really put a lot of thought into how people would actually use a PDA and designed everything accordingly. i’m also pretty impressed with Graffiti. it only took a couple minutes to pick up enough that i could start using it and i’ve been getting steadily faster ever since (i suspect that the years i spent writing chinese probably helped me out a bit; by now i’m used to writing things with the order and direction of the stroke being important).

the thing that really surprised me though was how friggin cool the IR port is. i hadn’t even thought about it before i got it but, damn, it’s neat. i spent the first hour i had it gleefully beaming cards around the office. one of my coworkers made the mistake of beaming me a game called “dopewars” which will probably be my downfall (in the game you’re a drug dealer running around NYC buying and selling drugs trying to make enough of a profit fast enough that the loan sharks don’t come break your legs. it’s… um.. addictive).

i was also pretty happy that i got it to synch up with my linux box without any trouble at all (although so far, only with the serial cradle that i picked up for it). aside from periodically flaking out and crashing, kpilot has been pretty good to me. i have yet to try the gnome-pilot programs but i probably won’t bother since i figure that most of what i do aside from backups will be through conduits that i write myself (oh, i’ve got plans, i do).

the backlight does suck though. it’s got that weird inverted kind of backlight. i don’t like it much at all. but i guess it uses less power than a normal backlight so i’ll live with it.

so next i have to find a good wireless modem module for it and i’ll be in business.

anyone have any suggestions on good accessories that are worth getting (prasanth mentioned something about little stickers that you put on the screen to keep it from wearing out) and where to get them?