Handspring Visor

» see handspring.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is a rectangular hole in the back of every Visor, and most people who owned one never put anything in it. That hole was the reason the machine existed. The Springboard slot took a cartridge that carried its own software, so the handheld became a different device on contact, with no driver to install and no cable to find. Handspring shipped modules for a modem and for a camera. Later there was one with a phone in it.

The company was founded in June 1998 by the people who had made the PalmPilot, after 3Com's ownership took Palm somewhere they did not want to go. Handspring announced the Visor on 13 September 1999. It ran Palm OS under license with Handspring's own additions and cost $149 for the entry model, against Palm's more expensive equivalents. It also synced over USB while Palm was still on a serial cable, and that was the detail people noticed first. A Visor sync took seconds.

It worked. Over a million units went out by the end of 2000, and the company had gone public on NASDAQ that June, closing 35 percent up on its first day of trading. Sales reached $370.9 million in 2001. For about two years the second-place handheld in the world was made by the people who had invented the first-place one.

In 2000 I was in high school in Turkey with a dial-up line and no appointments. A Visor cost $149 before an importer got hold of it, and what it did best was hold a calendar for somebody whose week was made of meetings. The object that ended up in every pocket here was a Nokia, bought on a carrier deal and paid for by the minute, and it already held everybody's numbers. The handheld organizer is a category Turkey mostly skipped, going from paper to the phone with nothing in between.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the slot ~

Springboard was a different idea about what a small computer is. Instead of a fixed device with ports on it, you had a base with an opening, and the identity of the machine changed with whatever occupied the opening. The module was not an accessory in the usual sense. It was hardware and software in one piece, and pulling it out removed both of them cleanly, with nothing left behind in the operating system.

Nothing since has quite repeated it. Phones went the other way, absorbing every function into the sealed body, and the expansion slot survives only as a place to put more storage. The last mainstream device to argue that a handheld should physically change shape was this one.

~ the arithmetic of a module ~

The problem was money. A Springboard module cost a large fraction of what the whole handheld cost, and it occupied the only slot for as long as it was doing its single job. The VisorPhone turned the organizer into a telephone you held against the side of your face like a paperback. It was a real product and a clever one, and almost nobody bought a second module after their first.

So the platform was a platform in the developer sense and not in the customer sense. People bought the Visor because it was a good cheap Palm, and the hole in the back stayed a hole.

~ the pivot ~

On 15 January 2002 Donna Dubinsky said it in public: "We are a company that is transitioning out of the organizer business and into the communicator business. At some point we will have transitioned out of the organizer business." She would not name a date. The date turned out to be spread across the whole of that year, one model at a time. The Prism went, and by 11 July 2002 the Visor Edge was listed as No Longer Available on Handspring's own store.

The Treo was the reason. Handspring had worked out before nearly anyone else that the handheld and the phone would end up as one object, and it built that object in 2002 with a thumb keyboard on the front. It was right about the future and too small to survive being right. Palm announced it was buying the company on 4 June 2003 and stockholders approved on 28 October. The merged hardware business took the name palmOne.

~ the address ~

handspring.com went on serving its own pages long after the decisions had been made elsewhere. The Visor names were still sitting in the site navigation in June 2003, well after the last one was built, and the front page was still Handspring's own on 4 May 2004. By 4 June that year the address had become a redirect, and everything under it went to palmOne.

The name that survived is Treo, which is filed under Palm now and belongs in the history of the phone rather than the organizer. Visor belongs to a narrow window when a pocket computer was still allowed to be modular, and the modules were the thing everybody talked about and nobody bought.

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