Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Urbana IL
Posts: 144

Well, at my last snapshot, 87% of (voting) visitors to this site consider the absence of flash to be a "very" to "somewhat" important issue. Since I know there has been some interest on the part of Handspring in this forum, I'd really like to see some kind of comment from them.

We've all heard about the possibility for soft-only incremental upgrades, etc. I'd be relieved, though, to hear from the horse's mouth what Handspring's plans are to support newer PalmOS builds. I'm also curious whether or not the chip is physically replacable by the end user, and if so what Handspring's stance would be on that.

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Salt Lake City, Ut
Posts: 23

Well, here is what I think. There is really only 3 possiblilites that could happen in my mind, and here are the facts, there is no flash memory currently. 1. Handspring dosen't support any kind of upgrade at all, be it software of other. 2. They support software upgrades to a certain point. ( I mean, you can't really software upgrade to 4.0, but probably 3.3) 3. They come out with a new visor that has flash rom in it.
In my opinion, number two is the best choice. On the poll I voted for somewhat a concern, but frankly, the more i have thought about it, the more I really don't care as much that it doesn't have flash rom. Yes, it would be nice to have, but it is easy enough to just upgrade in software via a patch. Right now I have an old palm personal which I have patched in software. I can't even tell the differance. I guess it is just bug fixes. I have seen Palm OS 3.0, and frankly, there is not a whole lot of difference between it and my palm OS 2.0.
People have been saying how bad of a thing it is that they didn't put flash rom in it, but I think it was a very smart idea. It cut the cost down, and if you really want, just get the patches. There really isn't going to be that much of a difference between what the Visor ships with, and the new OS(3.3??). Heck, I would be happy to have a Visor if it still had palm OS 2.0.
To sum it all up, I think that it is not a very big deal weather or not we can flash the new OS in. If you really want it, just patch. I for one am glad that the Visor is a little bit cheaper because it doesn't have the flash rom in it.

Foxer