If I had been tracking the financial performance of Handspring a bit more closely, I might have been more in tune with why the company had been pissing me off so much.

I have a Handspring Visor (the Prism, their color model), which they now only sell reconditioned. My wife bought it for my for Christmas 2001, along with an eyeModule2–a spiffy little digital camera attachment for Handspring's proprietary but cool Springboard interface. Then, I found out after upgrading to Mac OS X, that Handspring had bought the eyeModule operation and ceased all development work–so there would be no upgrade of the software to work with OS X.

This adds an extra piece of complexity into my life. Now, when I want to download the pictures I've snapped with my digital pinhole camera (that's basically what it is–entirely dependent on available light, fixed focal length, and occasionally surprising results), I have to reboot in OS 9 and reconfigure HotSync, suck off the photos and then reboot to OS X.

Now, Handspring is refocused on its phone/handheld Treo devices (and it's downsized considerably over the last year as it's bled money), so it's doubtful that there will ever be further support for the eyeModule. It's become yet another piece of legacy technology for me to fiddle with.

I'm gradually digging into the backlog of new software that Apple has been shoving across the Internet onto my hard drive, and finally got around to configuring iSync, a feature of the .Mac service. I never thought something so simple could be such a big deal–that is, until I suddenly found all the addresses and calendar entries on my laptop, desktop and Handspring synchronized.

Now, mind you, the results require a bit of a merge-purge, since I've had seperate versions of all this data in my e-mail, on the Handspring, and so on. But by pushing the button on the Handspring's cradle, I now sync the desktop and the handheld with the data from my laptop.

The Handspring's synchronization was somewhat temperamental (it crapped out on address book synchronizaton the first time through), but that's been my experience with the Handspring in general with OS X).