The Handspring Visor Solo is a rather curious little guy with a curious history. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you mistook the Visor as a PalmPilot, after all Handspring was created by the original trio who setup PalmPilot but disagreed with the companys choices after the 3Com acquisition but sadly only lasted 5 years before being enveloped by PalmPilot once more.
The Visor packed a mighty Freescale Semiconductor DragonBall or MC68328 microprocessor, a total of 2Mb of onboard and synced by USB, which was significantly faster than Palm’s RS232 serial sync. Interestingly though the Visor runs Palm OS 3.1H however i did come across a old Frech blog from 1998 talked about a project trying to get linux 2.0 running on the MC68328 which would be definitely an interesting project to try and hunt down.
The one I got my hands on was “not functional” and didn’t have a cable however on closer inspiration the internal cmos was the wrong way and the display unplugged, so overall an easy fix. The lack of a sync cable was fixed by soldering pin 4 to ground, pin 5 to data negative and pin 6 to data positive of the 8 pin connector to a usb c breakout board. To my delight a large collection of software and operating systems has been archived on internet archive and palmdb. Overall a fun little bit of history.
