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.
 

	USB	Serial	8MB Flash Module	Backup Module
Xfer Speed	1.34 MB/min	0.27 MB/min	1.0 MB/min	1.25 MB/min

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