Costing relatively little, the Visor Deluxe is a stylish but rugged PDA which runs the Palm OS 3.1 operating system under licence. If you have ever used a Palm product, you'll know how to use the Visor Deluxe immediately. The machine sports a 160x160-pixel black-and-white screen and comes with 8MB of memory, which is plenty for all your personal information, ebooks and any third-party software which you might fancy running. The shape of the device looks similar to the old Palm III but HandSpring has made it available in a range of fun translucent case colours in addition to good old charcoal.

A dedicated active area immediately below the screen is employed for entering text with pen-strokes. It does this via the Palm OS Graffiti handwriting recognition system, which after just a little practice works rather well. But this is no word processor: the Visor Deluxe is a classic PDA for organising your life, not business documents.

The best feature of the machine is the SpringBoard slot on the back. This is designed to take a slowly increasing number of third-party add-on hardware modules, such as MP3 players, audio recorders and digital cameras. Just bear in mind that there are still very few of these available and most of them are disconcertingly expensive. Otherwise, the hardware design is straightforward for a palmtop, with a pair of up-down scrolling buttons and special buttons for the Date Book, Address Book, To Do List and Memo Pad.

Basically, HandSpring have come up with the first mass-appeal, affordable PDA to come with professional-class applications. Despite the clever SpringBoard idea, most people will see the Visor Deluxe as the perfect palmtop when the budget is tight.