Handspring will announce something on Monday, and most rumormongers agree it will be a slimmed-down version of the Visor handheld.
Handspring has invited the media to its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, but the company won't comment on the widely circulating rumors about new products.
Fan sites dedicated to handhelds reckon Handspring will introduce a new slim PDA called the "Visor Edge."
According to the scuttlebutt from sites such as PDABuzz, PalmStation and VisorCentral, the new organizer will be considerably thinner and lighter than the current line of Handspring Visors.
Pictures purported to be the new Visor Edge, which have a brushed metal case and come in three colors, have surfaced on sites PDABuzz, and PalmInfocenter.
The Visor Edge reportedly will have a monochrome screen, 8 MB of RAM, Version 3.5 of the PalmOS and a rechargeable lithium battery. It will be available in April for $399.
Perhaps more important could be Handspring's rumored switch to a smaller Springboard expansion slot.
Standard Springboard modules will be too big to slot inside the unit, and so the Visor Edge will come with an adapter to allow Springboard modules to piggyback onto the rear of the unit.
Some enthusiasts have speculated that Handspring is reworking its expansion slot to support the Secure Digital (SD) memory card.
More than 80 companies have pledged to support SD, an emerging standard for postage-stamp-size devices.
The first SD cards are expected to be memory units. But wireless Bluetooth cards, tiny cameras and GPS receivers are on the horizon. The first memory cards, with 32 and 64-Mbyte capacities, will debut later this month.
Ray Creech, president of the SD Association said the new Springboard slot is definitely not an SD card slot.
"I am the guy who signs all the licenses," he said, "and Handspring doesn't have a license. I'd be surprised, no, alarmed, if Handspring came out with an SD card device."
Competitor Palm computing is introducing new handhelds that will support SD cards next week.
Like the Visor Edge, the Palm m500 and the m505 handhelds will be thinner and lighter, with silver metallic cases and faster, 33 MHz Motorola DragonBall VZ chips.
While Handspring pioneered expansion slots in handhelds, none of its competitors have adopted its Springboard slot. Handheld makers such as Sony and Palm have developed their own proprietary expansion slots.
Richard Doherty, director of research for The Envisioneering Group, a market research firm based in Seaford, N.Y., said it's taken Handspring a long time to catch on to the slimmer-is-better trend.
Palm introduced its slimmer Palm V two years ago, which has sold like hotcakes despite its higher price.
Based on the pictures he's seen on the Web, Doherty said "It's like Twiggy, it's a lot slimmer than previous Handspring devices. We will see if the combination of Springboard adapter and slim device will be as sexy as the Palm V was."
As for the new Springboard slot, he said there's been no public commitment from the 60-odd manufacturers of Springboard modules. He is hoping to see wide-scale backing at Monday's press conference.
And he doesn't think a new Springboard form factor, which brings the number of different expansion formats for the Palm OS to six, would be a problem.
"I wouldn't say it's one format too far yet," he said. "But some of the new peripherals -- GPS receivers and phones and so on -- may prove to be too cumbersome for the new, smaller slot."
