Project PDA

Handspring is a maker of Personal Digital Assistants using the PalmOS operating system. The original inventors of the Palm Pilot who founded Palm, Inc. were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan.

3Com purchased Palm, Inc. and after some time the three became upset with 3Com having too much control over the product. As a result, they left and founded Handspring in June 1998. In 2003 Handspring merged back with Palm, Inc. to form PalmOne. The Treo 600 is the last Handspring product.

Handspring Visor

The company launched the Handspring Visor line of products on September 14, 1999 which, unlike most products produced by Palm at the time, 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 colored 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, and even a device for connecting to an EKG.

Visor and Visor Deluxe

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 Dragonball processor, a modified version of the OS from Palm that included an enhanced datebook, a city time application, and an advanced calculator.

Visor Prism

When Handspring released the Visor Prism, it was the first Palm OS handheld to have a 16-bit color display (65,536 colors); the current model (IIIc) produced by Palm only had an 8-bit color display (256 colors). Its power came from a rechargeable lithium ion battery, rather than two AAA batteries like most Visors. However, it did have the Visor standard Springboard Expansion Slot.

Visor Platinum

The Visor Platinum was similar to the Visor Deluxe. In fact, apart from shell color, the exterior of the devices were indistinguishable. The Visor Platinum was available only in a silver (or platinum) colored shell, as opposed to the Visor Deluxe's many color choices.

Visor Edge

Released in March 2001, the slim Visor Edge featured a MC68VZ328 DragonBall™ CPU clocked at 33 MHz. The 160×160-pixel, 4-bit grayscale (16 shades of gray) display was standard for most Palm PDAs. However, at the time it was the smallest and lightest Visor, sizing in at 4.7" x 3.1" x 0.44" and weighing 4.8 ounces. Packed with 8 MB RAM and Handspring's latest version of the Palm OS, version 3.5.2H, the Visor Edge was an appealing PDA.

Visor Neo

The Visor Neo offered nothing new to the Handspring Visor lineup. Released in September 2001, the Neo featured a MC68VZ328 DragonBall™ processor clocked at 33 MHz. It had 8 MB DRAM, an IrDA-compliant infrared interface, and Handspring's standard Springboard Expansion Slot. It also sported a built-in microphone and a 160×160-pixel, 2-bit grayscale (4 shades of gray) display.

Visor Pro

The Visor Pro was Handspring's last model in its Visor series of PDAs. The 4.8" × 3.0" × 0.7" unit was powered by a MC68VZ328 DragonBall™ processor clocked at 33 MHz. Weighing 5.7 ounces, the unit came with 16 MB RAM, a built-in microphone, and Handspring's Springboard Expansion Slot. It had a 4-bit grayscale (16 grays), backlit, monochrome display. Its power supply came from a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.