I have been testing the Xircom SpringPort Wireless Ethernet adapter (SWE) for about a month now; some of you may have seen me walking around with a cool-looking device sticking out of my Visor PDA. I have been checking my email, looking up sports scores real-time, accessing the NextBus N-Judah predictions, reading news, and much more. The SWE is compatible with the industry standard 802.11b protocol and should work with most wireless networks. This means that you can use the same unit at school, at home, or anywhere else with a wireless network (you may need to change your configuration to work with each network; the SWE allows for 3 custom configurations).
The top speed for this and other wireless ethernet adapters is 11 megabits per second, roughly 1.25 megabytes per second. However, actual throughput depends on interference and distance from the network antenna.
There is a built-in nickel metal hydride rechargeable battery to power the unit, resulting in a minimal drain on your Visor batteries. However, maintaining a wireless connection consumes a lot of power and I found that one full charge allows for approximately 2 hours of continuous network activity. This is more than enough for the average day's worth of checking email and medical searches on the Internet. Although it was a minor inconvenience to use the separate charger for my Visor Deluxe, Visor Edge and Prism owners have the luxury of seamless integration with the cradle for sync'ing and charging. Recharging is relatively fast and takes approximately one hour to fully charge a depleted battery.
Xircom is selling SWE units faster than they can make them. SWE is well constructed and sleek, a nice complement to the Visor graphite. Although the functionality is seamless and it is very easy to use, I don't believe that the Internet is PDA-friendly enough. The utility of the SWE is limited by the quality of the Internet websites (and the price should therefore also be limited, according to economic theory). I would imagine that students probably would not be willing to pay more than about (dollar amount) for this module. I wonder who all the "early adopters" are-they must be wealthy if they are willing to spend (dollar amount) on a module for their Visor handheld.
This module is a wonderful gadget to add to your tech collection, but it is hardly worth purchasing at this time unless you have money to burn. (...) Moreover, only a few websites have a specially designed text-only or PDA-friendly page (Yahoo Mobile, Synapse Mobile, CNN). Even though you are connected real-time to the Internet and the memory footprint on your Visor is not really a concern (files are stored only temporarily in cache), large images slow down the loading of a page and often hinders reading of relevant information. Most websites are poorly designed and difficult to view across all web browsers and operating systems anyway--making a PDA-friendly version is low priority on most webmaster todo lists. So until more websites actually offer PDA-friendly pages and the price of the SWE module drops by at least half, this review finds that the Xircom SpringPort Wireless Ethernet module for Handspring Visors is a neat gadget with great potential, but not worth getting unless you have the medical condition known as MCOW (first publicized in a public service announcement by E*Trade during the 2000 Super Bowl, where a guy in critical condition is wheeled into the ER and the doctors gasp when they find that he's got "money coming out the wazoo").
