Remote access from your PDA is becoming more and more a necessity these days. No one likes being tethered to his or her Visor cradle. Card Access Inc last year came out with a fabulous modem called the Wristband Thinmodem. The beauty of the new SpringBoard Module was its size. It required no batteries and maintained the original form factor of your Visor. Well Card Access Inc just upped the ante with the next product in their line of Wristband products, the ThinModemPlus.

The ThinModemPlus has the same form factor and power profile as the ThinModem and manages to pack in 8 Megabytes of Flash memory with 56K modem connect speeds.

In part one of this review I will go over some of my first impressions of the ThinModemPlus from my experiences in the lab. Over the next several days I will be traveling down to Oregon and test this gem in the wild. When I return I will post my real world findings.

To start I pulled the modem out of the box to plug it into our Visor Prism. I searched for the batteries and found that like its little brother it required none, drawing a very small amount of power from the visor itself using advanced chip design and power management.

As soon as I inserted the ThinModemPlus it opened up its setup program. Here you will find a tutorial on how to setup the modem, Preferences applet, Dial-up Network Wizard, and Mail and Internet applet.

I selected the Dial-up and Network Wizard and was taken through several pages of very detailed information. At the Network configuration screen I selected my ISP, entered my user name and password, local phone number, clicked Connect and I was done. Of course I has already plugged in the 6-foot phone cable that came with it. I would like to note that this is a custom cable that you will not find at your local Radio Shack. It would have been nice to see them use an X-Jack connector that is commonly found in newer laptop modems.

The ThinModemPlus includes Browse-it web-rendering/browsing software from PumaTech. I must say I was surprised at how fast this browser worked. I was able to view our mobile page at MaximumPDA.com/avantgo.htm in seconds! What was even more impressive was being able to view our main site with little trouble. The color screen on the Visor prism helps a great deal. To see how effective the modem was at moving streaming data I installed PalmVNC, a Tool to remote control PCs over a TCP/IP connection. It connected to my laptop immediately and I was actually controlling my laptop from the Visor Prism over a phone line, a very cool trick.

By Bill Landon
Senior Editor -- MaximumPDA