Handspring Inc. Monday added two products to its Visor family of handheld
computers: one boasting color, the other touting speed.
Visor Prism, the company’s first color-enabled product, has 16-bit color
and can display more than 65,000 colors for viewing picture-quality
graphics.
Visor Platinum is 50 percent faster than Visor Deluxe, according to the
company, and as much as twice as fast as many other Palm OS products.
“Visor Platinum’s increased performance coupled with a display capable of
16 shades of gray will help enable developers to create new
performance-intensive and advanced graphics applications,” said Joe Sipher,
vice president of product marketing for Handspring.
The products feature the Springboard expansion slot to harness the true
benefits of a color display and full expandability, Sipher added.
“Combining Visor Prism’s rich, bright color display with Springboard
expansion technology makes it a unique platform for exciting applications
like digital photography, global positioning systems, and color Internet
browsing,” he said.
Additionally, third-party developers are working with new Springboard
modules designed to take advantage of the benefits of vibrant color
including a GPS module from GeoDiscovery, an MP3 player from Good Technology
and a color game pack from Pocket Express. In addition, IDEO has released a
free software update for its eyemodule so people can take pictures with both
the Prism and Platinum editions of Visor.
Both products will be available in November through U.S. retail partners.
Japanese version of the products will be showcased at World PC Expo in
Tokyo, Japan, this week. The company expects to begin selling the Japanese
versions before the end of the year, along with International English and
German versions in Europe.
International English versions are also expected for Asia in early 2001
and other languages and markets will follow.
