One of the things that has always been touted about the Handspring Visor is
the speed of USB. But how much faster is USB than serial? To find
out, I set up a Windows 98 computer (Dell™ Pentium II 450Mhz w/ 128MB RAM)
with both a USB and a serial cradle. All times below are an average
of several HotSyncs™. Serial sync is set to As Fast as Possible.
Numbers in green are the best for that
column.
First I took a 1077KB file (the Palm IPO) and installed it on the Visor using
both USB and serial cradles. Here are the times:
|
USB |
Serial |
| Xfer Speed |
22.9 KB/s |
4.6 KB/s |
| Time (mm:ss) |
00:47 |
03:56 |
As you can see USB is much faster than serial -- almost five times
faster. This really makes a difference when downloading large etexts or
installing MP3 files onto a Springboard module.
When compared to the transfer (Xfer) speeds of the 8MB
Flash Module and the Backup
Module , the USB cradle is still faster. Below are the times in terms
of MB per minute. USB HotSync is slightly faster than the Backup
Module and over 30% faster than the 8MB
Flash Module.
I also wanted to find out how long a normal sync would take. I made
sure the Visor and Palm Desktop were both current then synchronized. The
only thing I didn’t have set to sync was Mail. Here are the times:
|
USB |
Serial |
| Time (mm:ss) |
00:09 |
00:11 |
If you notice the times below are very close. This is probably because
the code for HotSync is optimized to quickly find out if there is anything that
needs to be synced. If there are no changes, it quickly moves along to the
next conduit.
OS Speed >>
