March 07, 2001 | Guess what -- convergence is finally here, and it fits in the palm of your hand, courtesy of Handspring. It's the VisorPhone, a new cellular phone half the size of Motorola's venerable StarTAC and weighing just 2.9 ounces. It slides into the back of a Handspring Visor PDA and turns the Palm-compatible organizer into a full-featured cellphone. I've had this phone for more than a month now, and I love it.

Previous attempts at building an integrated cellular telephone and personal organizer have been less than successful. There's the clip-on organizer Motorola created for StarTAC phones. Nokia keeps adding new features to the address book inside its popular cellphones, and a number of companies make programs that will synchronize a phone's address book with your desktop computer. Back in 1999, Sprint introduced the Qualcomm pdQ, a somewhat oversized and disappointing phone that had a keypad that folded down to reveal a Palm III computer.

The combination of the Visor PDA and phone does a better job than all of these other attempts -- it's even better than the ill-fated pdQ. And in a curious twist, the Visor duo makes a more usable cellphone than most stand-alone cellphones. It's a real example of integration creating a better product -- something that the high-tech industry constantly promises, but rarely delivers.

The original Handspring Visor was designed with the VisorPhone in mind. Back when the folks at Handspring (incidentally, the same people who created the original Palm organizer) were designing the first Visors, they wanted to create a phone module but simply didn't have the time or the engineering resources. So they did the next best thing -- they designed into the Visor the connectors and additional hardware that the future phone module would require. As a result, the first Visors to come off the line had a little hole in the lower left-hand corner, with a tiny microphone wired in place. But the microphone wasn't wired to anything inside the Visor itself; instead, a pair of wires snakes from the microphone to the Visor's "springboard" expansion slot. When you plug the VisorPhone module into the Visor, it uses the built-in mike -- which sounds great.

Likewise, a second pair of wires goes from the connector at the base of the Visor to the springboard and is used for charging the phone's batteries (which requires much more power than can be provided over a standard Universal Serial Bus interface). The speaker for the VisorPhone is in the black module itself. (There is also a jack for a headset.)

Because of this advance planning, the Visor and VisorPhone combo is significantly smaller than other ill-fated integration attempts. My pdQ was a big brick that was awkward to carry; worse, the pdQ had two different user interfaces -- a keypad for the phone and the LCD screen for the Palm. The new combo, on the other hand, weighs 8.5 ounces and fits in my shirt pocket. Better still, the VisorPhone is completely controlled by a set of PalmOS applications that automatically get installed on the Visor when the module is inserted.

Making phone calls is pretty easy. You start by clicking the "phone" button on top of the phone module, which makes the Visor display an application with 10 auto-dial buttons. Touch a button with the Visor stylus (or your finger) and the phone dials. If the phone number you want to call isn't in your auto-dialer, you click the "phone" button again and the Visor will display a telephone keypad; you tap the number and then talk. You can also dial any phone number in the Palm's address book by tapping the number displayed and then confirming that you wish to dial it. Finally, you can dial any number in a memo or on your calendar by selecting the number with the stylus and then pressing the "dial" button.

The Visor displays the call's elapsed time, and you can put a person on hold by tapping a button on the phone application. You can also place a second call or handle a second incoming call. Or, if you are exceptionally good at multitasking, you can click into another PalmOS application. You can even turn off the Palm, since the phone has its own battery and built-in microcomputer. Just about the only thing you can't do is pull the VisorPhone out of the Visor's springboard slot -- that makes it hang up.