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Once upon a time, being "wired" meant you had a modem. Beepers were for doctors and cell phones were for those with far too much money to spend wisely. Nowadays, you can find plenty of people weighed down by a cell phone, a beeper, a notebook with a wireless net connection, and a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), often using more than one device at once. Things have advanced so far, the term "wired" has now been supplanted by the term "connected."

Today, we are going to look at Handspring's Visor Deluxe, a small, hand-held PDA running the Palm OS. A Visor Deluxe is the digital equivalent of an address book. It can manage your appointments, track phone numbers, notes, and more, all in the quest of organizing your life.

How does Handspring's Visor Deluxe stack up? Let's find out.

Handspring's Visor Deluxe is a Palm OS clone. It uses the same core hardware and OS technology as the ever popular Palm Pilot, runs at the same speed, carries 8MB of memory, just like most Palm Pilots, and has an interface that will be extremely familiar to Palm Pilot users. Its primary built-in software includes an integrated date book and address book, e-mail, a calculator, a to-do list, and a world clock. The date book, calculator, and world clock are all enhanced versions of the software that comes standard with the regular Palm Pilot.

The Visor Deluxe runs on two AAA batteries, whose life depends on how often you use the unit. Judging from the amount of life left in our batteries when we were done with the sample unit, we expect most people will get between one and two months out of a pair of batteries.