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.

The company launched the Handspring Visor line of products on September 14, 1999. Unlike most products produced by Palm at the time, they used USB to synchronize with the desktop computer and included an expansion port. The USB support made these the first Palm devices to work with the Macintosh operating system out-of-the-box. More liberal in design than the Palm Pilot, the Visor line featured vibrantly coloured handhelds focused more towards average people. The expansion port, called the Springboard Expansion Slot, allowed for addition of modules such as games, ebooks, extra memory, universal television remotes, cellular telephones, modems, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS receivers, and even a device for connecting to an EKG. The display of all Visors measured 2.25 inches square with diagonal span of 3.0 inches. 

Handspring first introduced the Visor Solo, which was black and contained 2MB of onboard memory. The Visor Deluxe had the option of translucent coloured models, and had 8MB 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. Critics of the device note the lack of rubber between the buttons and metal contacts making the buttons harder to press. There were also complaints that the screen cover was not connected, making it easy to lose, despite its ability to attach onto the back of the Visor exactly as it attached to the front.

Our unit is complete with original box, docking station and installation CD.

Manufacturer: Handspring
Date: 14th September 1999

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH5781. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.