Ahrr! Just tell me what to buy! (click on image)

The Visor Prism and Visor Deluxe, manufactured by Handspring, are no longer in production. Handspring decided to go in a different direction and stop competing with Palm and other Palm OS PDA manufacturers and focus on a different market; combination phones and PDAs.

The Visor was a very successful product, however, and there are still thousands (if not millions) out there. If you have one, or can get one cheap (try Ebay) then you have a simple PDA to use with GPS2PDA.

The Visor uses the Palm OS, and runs at the same speed as the most basic Palm PDAs (slow), but it is sufficient for our needs.

The Visor Prism (shown here) has a color display that unfortunately is one of the worst color displays around; it is almost unreadable outdoors. In most cars however, it is ok.

The Visor Deluxe is almost identical to the Prism except it has a grayscale display (not quite monochrome, but close). The display is easy to read both indoors and out and works fine with GPS2PDA.

The Visor line of PDAs were very popular because they have a slot, called the Springboard slot, that allows you to add many different types of peripherals to the PDA, such as cameras, extra memory, and GPS receivers. A small cottage industry flourished selling these Springboard modules. The only springboard receiver we initially liked turned out to have a serious problem (see below). Currently we support Visors, but only through the serial port used for Hotsynching.

You can use any of the GPS receivers discussed on this site that connect to standard serial ports on PDAs or laptops. There is a trick however. You need a special cable that is designed to work with serial devices like GPS receivers. You can buy this cable at gps4fun.com for $49. (click here). The cable is a little expensive because it has electronics built into it to convert the signals from the Visor into standard serial voltages. Another source of an equivalent cable is Markspace.com (click here). Their cable is only $24.95 and it works well, if it is in stock.

If you already have a Visor, then you really don’t need a new PDA (you may not want your boss to see this if you have been angling for a new spiffy PDA). Get the special cable and use an external GPS receiver, such as the Holux 210.

HandyGPS Plus:

You can get a GPS springboard module that works with Visors A company called Nexian sells a product called the HandyGPS Plus (see photo here) that plugs into the slot on a Visor. It works pretty well if you use the software that comes with the receiver.They also sell an external antenna which we consider necessary for proper operation of GPS2PDA. One source of this GPS receiver is here. It sells for $199.

Unfortunately, this receiver doesn’t work well with GPS2PDA. The output from this receiver is a little odd and our software has trouble with it. Instead of a constant amount of data each second, it sends out extra data every 5 or 10 seconds. We might be able to get the software to work with this receiver, but at the moment we are saying that we don’t support it. If you really want us to support this receiver, then let us know. We can’t promise anything more than to say we will take a closer look.

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