Handspring created the Treo, which became Palm's entry into smartphones when Palm acquired Handspring.
But revenue at Palm, which even bought Handspring (another struggling PDA maker), still shrank.
Then what was left of Palm Inc merged with Handspring into a new public company, palmOne.
Palm licensed its operating system to Nokia and Handspring, cutting Microsoft Windows CE off at the knees.
Formed in 1995, it gained fame by putting money into Ebay and big winners like Ariba and HandSpring.
To make it all work smoothly, Handspring brought in the contract manufacturers as it was designing the Visor.
One of the first companies to license the Palm OS was Handspring, founded by former Palm executives.
Let's turn back the clock to 2002, the year Handspring launched its first smartphone, the monochrome 160 x 160-pixel Treo 180.
In return, software employees are barred from seeing prototype handhelds lest they leak details to Sony, Handspring and others.
"Java is a great programming language, but there is not a big intersection between handhelds and Java, " said Jeff Hawkins, founder of HandSpring.
Handspring, the company behind the Visor personal digital assistant, followed the Cisco model from the start: It has no factories of its own.
One day, outside the school, the gymnasts are egging her on and she does a back handspring that nearly staggers you with its perfection.
The built-in speaker sounds tinny, and dialing people directly from the contact list is not as elegantly handled as it is on Handspring's Treo.
Manufacturers of personal digital assistants like Palm and Handspring will eventually vie for a piece of that action, perhaps in collaboration with some phone makers.
According to Palm Computing veteran Epting, who joined Handspring in January, this is both because of the Springboard's ease of use and the hand-held's limited memory.
On his fifth, the vault, he attempted a Yurchenko double-full, meaning a round-off back handspring onto the table, and a flip with two twists in the air.
The Handspring Treo was for many the first converged-device handset that accomplished key tasks well enough to make a convincing case for handset integration, and the smartphone revolution ensued.
One industry analyst said HandSpring and OminSky deserve credit for their ability to execute, but that the real benefits of wireless data will only come when 3G (third-generation) technology is available.
While the company's management has faltered lately, its founders, now at rival Handspring, have just announced another potential breakthrough: the Treo Communicator, which seamlessly combines a phone, organizer and wireless Internet device.
The Springboard slot in the Handspring (nasdaq: HAND - news - people ) Visor even allows the addition of keyboards, MP3 players or a device that reads news articles aloud.
She's a dedicated Apple Computer aapl (nasdaq: aapl - news - people) Macintosh user who just bought her first handheld, a Handspring hand (nasdaq: hand - news - people) Visor.
Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky , creators of the Palm and Handspring personal digital assistants and the Treo smartphone, have formed a software company built around a powerful and unorthodox vision of how the human brain works.
Dubinsky, one of the founders of Palm Computing, left that company after it was sold to 3Com, and launched Handspring, which made its own handhelds that ran the Palm OS. 3Com then spun out Palm into a public company, Palm Inc.
Like the Treo devices from Handspring (nasdaq: HAND - news - people ) and the Blackberry devices from Research In Motion (nasdaq: RIMM - news - people ), this PDA has a thumb-operated QWERTY keyboard.
When orders for Visors come in over the website (hosted by yet another company), the information is fed first to its fulfillment partner, which keeps the inventory, then directly to Handspring's contract manufacturers, Flextronics and Solectron, which also package and ship the product.
"We all live in Mr Punch's shadow and what a strange shadow it is, " laughs Mervyn Millar, UK director of Handspring - the puppet company behind War Horse, which is soon to unveil a new show Crow based on the poems of Ted Hughes.
For this particular Personal Massager, the selling point is its interface with the Handspring Visor, a competitor to Palm's own PDA. The Visor's familiar interface in theory gives the device more flexibility than what the company refers to as more "conventional" devices, allowing the user to program the device more easily than would otherwise be possible.
It talks with iChat and with Mail, Apple's new e-mail program, and will also work with Palm OS-based handheld computers, like those from Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ), Handspring (nasdaq: HAND - news - people ) or Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ).
There's little reason for new vendors to try and tackle the general-purpose PDA, as Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ) and Sony have that market--at least as far as the Palm OS world is concerned--to themselves, while Handspring (nasdaq: HAND - news - people ) has been producing Palm OS devices that double as phones.
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