Handspring!

The Visor I guess is basically a Palm III with a few modifications to the OS. Oh, and the one I got is blue (it comes in five colors). I think it also provides a better bang-for-the-buck than the Palm, since the high-end model I got is only $250, and has 8 Mb of memory (not that I have the faintest idea what I'll use 8 Mb for in a PDA!).

So I played around with it a bit during the day, and then spent much of the evening playing with it, transferring data from my Newton 100 (five years old, and was almost obsolete when I bought it!) to it, etc. etc. The USB-connected synchronization cradle works really well, and is quite zippy.

The only thing so far that I don't like about it is that it could use more default fields in the address book. Stuff like birthdays and second addresses get stored as notes, rather than in their own native fields. That's pretty lame. But, overall, I think I'll be happy with it, especially considering what I'm upgrading from.

What do I like best about it? It's much faster, and fits in my pocket.

Today also turned out to be a huge day for comic books. I think I bought something like 15 of them. Haven't yet read them all, but here are some thoughts on the ones I've read so far:

• Batman: Strange Apparitions trade paperback, by Steve Englehart, Len Wein, Walt Simonson, and Marshall Rogers (DC): In the 1970s, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers produced some of the more highly-acclaimed Batman stories in history, but they've always been hard to come by. DC has now released their work in this trade paperback.

  The writing doesn't hold up that well after 20 years. Although it's amusing to see Batman actually smiling and enjoying his work and the company of his now-college-aged partner Robin, the stories are very disjointed, and some of the plot threads never resolve themselves (possibly due to Englehart moving on after only a year). After a routine battle with Doctor Phosphorus, Batman ends up captured and unmasked by criminal Doctor Hugo Strange, who usurps his identity as Bruce Wayne to embezzle his money and sell his secret to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the city council president, Rupert Thorne, is trying to destroy Batman through his illegal manipulation of the city government. And, Bruce falls in love with a high-class young woman named Silver St. Cloud.

  The Thorn and Strange plot threads are not really wrapped up satisfactorily (there's a thread involving a ghost which is not explained at all), and the difficult relationship between Bruce and Silver is developed abruptly and terminated even more abruptly, amidst stories involving the Penguin and the Joker. The Joker yarn is pretty good, but the best story in the collection is Len Wein's tragedy about a villain named Clayface III, whose body is made of a mushy clay-like substance which he's forced to hold together in an exoskeleton. The resolution is a little grim - Batman doesn't really pause to figure out what Clayface's motivations are - but it's a good yarn overall.

• Captain Marvel #1, by Peter David, Chris Cross, and Anibal Rodriguez (Marvel): This may be the worst comic book I've ever read by Peter David (although his Dreadstar stuff was really horrible, too). Reprising an old, tired concept from the 1970s incarnation of this Marvel character, eternal teenager Rick Jones is once again bonded to Captain Marvel - this one the son of the original. Only one of them can exist at a time - they can switch places more-or-less at will - and they have running dialogues with each other.

  This situation is played almost entirely for laughs, which might work if any of the jokes approached being funny. Instead we have Rick cracking jokes at the expense of a couple of cops, Rick's bathroom being destroyed when he changes places with Cap, and a lame joke about Cap being "cosmically aware" ("You and half the druggies in the valley, pal."). Cross' artwork is polished, but goes in for the amazingly over-muscled look, and his characters' expressions are all completely over-the-top. Overall, my impression of this book is that it only exists to retain trademark on the Captain Marvel name. Avoid this at all costs.

• Deathblow Byblows #2 and 3, by Alan Moore and Jim Baikie (Wildstorm): Alan Moore's 1990s writing tends toward the mainstream, which is neat in that he often brings his innovative mind to traditional superhero comics (e.g., Supreme), but he also has been writing so many and varied comics that other, such as this one, don't quite seem to have a point. This story involves a number of - apparently - clones running around in an alien landscape after hatching from large mechanical pods. Why are they there? Who are they? The answers turn out not to be all that interesting, and the main character is monosyllabic, which makes it very hard to identify with her. Perhaps this is a setup for a later story, but on its own, it's not rewarding.

• Planetary #7, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (Wildstorm): This issue involves Ellis doing a riff on DC's John Constantine character. Constantine is a dark mystical do-gooder who is widely disliked by the people around him. In this story, Jack Carter has died and Planetary goes to his funeral, where they see many other DC analogues, including a Swamp Thing, Metal Men, Animal Man, and even Dream and Death from Sandman. The story ends up hinging on the nature of comics in the 80s vs. the 90s (something Ellis has also played with in Stormwatch), and a Miracleman-like character. In the end, Ellis even seems to drag another of his comics, Transmetropolitan, into it in a brief allusion. The story is okay, but overall is not as rewarding as the first issue (with a similarly large cast of homages) was.