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Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone (Full Documentary)

The Verge3 HN recommenders · 2022–2025
1.7M views · documentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2021-12-07

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

HN recommends it as an interview-rich history of Handspring, Palm OS and why telcos hurt early smartphones.

Tech company stories & documentariesConsumer devices & gadgetsHistory of computing

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6 comments from Hacker News

@roywiggins2022 · in “IBM Simon”

Calling it a Palm clone isn't really fair, it was developed by the team that founded Palm, Inc in the first place. [LINK] I thought this documentary about Handspring was interesting, and it also comes to the conclusion that the problem was at least mostly the telcos. [VIDEO]

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@BoorishBears2022 · in “Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse”

Apple is indeed the driving force that improved "targeted advertising, media consumption and unnecessary services subscription" compared to the old "Open the Web Browser and Owe 10 dollars" days by leveraging their iTunes userbase. Android would not even have launched without the iPhone breaking down those doors, you can hear it first hand from the Handspring/PalmOS/WebOS folks: [VIDEO]

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@pushedx2024 · in “PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS”

Right, it was ex-Palm employees at Handspring that created the Treo. Nice documentary about this with interviews: [VIDEO]

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@bonyt2024 · in “PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS”

I've heard blame partially put on carriers - they initially resisted even carrying the Treo line without putting limits on what Handspring could do with it. Apple had the iPod - and, crucially, customers - could bring these customers to the carriers, and so they could dictate more. [VIDEO] (the part I'm referencing is about 20 minutes in).

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@throwaway743542024 · in “Palm OS and the devices that ran it”

Handspring documentary by the Verge had an interesting perspective on the matter: [VIDEO] (I'm bad at cropping YouTube videos. The part in question is [12:53 - 14:30])

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@WorldPeas2025 · in “But what if I want a faster horse?”

Worse yet it's the only effective way to sync music to the iphone over a wired cable. I can tell they've abandoned their USB sync software because of how annoying the dialogs are when you plug your phone in and don't authenticate to start it, additionally that thay've (likely intentionally to push I-cloud) never added automatic usb photo sync from phone to computer. This probably all originated from when Apple shifted their convergence model from all around the desktop to all around the phone¹ [1] [VIDEO]

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