Palm devotees who have long suffered from a lack of expansion capabilities received a boost when Handspring, which licences Palm technology, announced a range of handhelds with a port for snap-on accessories, called Springboard.

At this stage you can get modules for games, memory expansion and backup, a digital camera, an MP3 player, a GPS and a mobile phone module. All models in the Handspring Visor range have the port, though the Edge, slimmer than the others, needs an extra interface module. Palm handhelds will have this add-on capability before June this year, but more about this later.

The products in the Handspring range line up model-for-model against Palms main four. Pricing is likewise similar. The Visor, with 2MB of memory, competes with the Palm M100. Next the Visor Deluxe (Palm IIIxe/ m105), the Prism with colour (Palm IIIc) and the Edge, vis-a-vis the Palm Vx. With Handspring products you get a USB cradle as standard and have to pay extra for serial connectivity. With the Palm products its the other way around.

All Handspring models use the Palm OS, with a few enhancements. Theres a better version of Date Book which has two extra views, week and full year, with the current day flashing so you can flick back to it easily. Handy, I thought. This can be your default date book. You can also now restore appointments youd trashed, create appointment templates, and set more kinds of reminders. Its now integrated with the To-Do List.

Compared to the Palm Vx, the Edge manages look smaller despite being slightly bigger in every dimension. The stylus sits outside the unit but seems impossible to knock off accidentally. Its considerably heavier than the smaller styli the other Handspring units and the Palms have, but this doesnt make it easier to use. To write smoothly on a handheld screen you need something you can hold easily. It needs to have a diameter around the same as an ordinary pen and a grippy surface, neither of which the Edge stylus has.

The one thing that irritates me about the Vx is that the cover often hits the buttons when you have it in your pocket, setting off this nagging fast clicking sound. The metal cover on the Edge makes this impossible.

Everyone who saw the two units together disagreed with me and thought the Edge looked better. To me, the Palm Vx has a carved-from-solid look about it that even a year of abuse hasnt taken away.

Still on the subject of quality, the cover on the Edge comes off far too easily. There are 17 small screws holding parts of the Edge together, one of which had already come out on the model I was given. Another fastening solution would have been a better idea. Anyone whos had those little screws constantly coming loose on their glasses will know what Im talking about. On the other hand, the display on my year-old Palm distorts slightly when I press with the stylus, which didnt happen with the Edge.

Of the Springboard modules, I tried a golf game and a memory module. After five years of plug-and-play-that-doesnt, someone has achieved it: these modules can plug in regardless of what your handheld is doing, ready to go in less than two seconds.

The games colours when playing on the Prism are impressive and they play quickly. The memory module gives you 8MB of extra storage. You can move data and programs to the memory module in seconds and run the programs directly from it with no loss of speed.

So, which do you buy, Palm or Handspring? Both offer an attractive out-of-warranty deal. My Vx can be replaced out of warranty for less than a quarter of the retail price. This means that whatever platform you decide on, youll have a reason to stay on it for longer than just the life of one unit. Ill stay with Palm for my perceptions of the quality more than anything else.

Palm says it will have a different kind of add-on port on all its units by the end of June. This standard, called SD (Secure Digital, offers a number of advantages over Springboard, including ten times the speed, greater security and much better packaging. If you can wait until June, that is.

Clem Roberts