Handspring (company)
 |
|
| Industry | PDAs |
|---|---|
| Fate | Bought Out |
| Successor | PalmOne |
| Founded | June 1998 |
| Defunct | 2003 |
|
Key people
|
Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan |
| Products | Handspring Visor, Handspring Treo |
Handspring was a maker of Palm OS-based Visor- and Treo-branded personal digital assistants. It was run by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, the original inventors of the Palm Pilot and founders of Palm Computing, after they became unhappy with the direction in which 3Com was taking the Palm division. Handspring was founded in June 1998 and merged with Palm, Inc.'s hardware division in 2003 to form palmOne. The Treo 600 was the last product to use the Handspring name.
Handspring first introduced the Visor Solo, which was black and contained two megabytes of onboard memory. The Visor Deluxe had the option of translucent colored models, and had eight megabytes of onboard memory.
The Visor and Visor Deluxe used Palm OS 3.1H running on a 16MHz or 20 MHz 68EZ328 Dragonball processor, a modified version of the OS from Palm that included an enhanced datebook, a city time graphical world clock, and an advanced calculator.
Unlike the Palm Pilot, the Visor's infrared port was placed on the side of the device to make room for the Springboard Expansion Slot. The Visor and Visor Deluxe weight is 5.4 oz. Their dimensions are 4.8" x 3.0" x 0.7". The display is 2.25 inches square with diagonal span of 3.0 inches.
Later Visor Deluxe had an updated OS with version numbers 3.1H2.
When Handspring released the Visor Prism, it was flashlight-bright and the first Palm OS handheld to have a 16-bit color display (65,536 colors); the contemporary model (IIIc) produced by Palm only had an 8-bit color display (256 colors).
Like Palm's IIIc, Prism's color screen turned nearly pitch black in sunlight. Prism's cobalt-blue-only case (and cradle, which required an attached AC charger, as USB cables could not supply power at the time) was a departure for a PDA line known for a broad array of colored cases.
Prism's power came from a rechargeable lithium ion battery, rather than two AAA batteries like previous Visors. However, despite the shoehorn-like contoured back to support the rechargeable battery, it did have the Visor Springboard slot; the infrared port was again on the side.
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Wikipedia