The start of something new

The secret history of the first real smartphone

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. This is the story of the Treo.

In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures.

It’s a half-hour-long documentary featuring the key players at Palm and Handspring: Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, Ed Colligan, and more.

Handspring may no longer be a household name, but it was briefly one of the fastest growing businesses in American history, selling Visor personal digital assistants. But the company had bigger aspirations: it saw a mobile future and took the first steps toward what would become the modern smartphone — even as it faced skepticism from the entire industry.

The dream of the Handspring Treo turned out to be too far ahead of its time — before either the technology inside smartphones or the industry that sold them was ready for it. And a number of bad internal decisions and outside disasters would stall Handspring long enough that Apple would go on to do what Handspring couldn’t.

Springboard is also a look at an earlier time in tech — when the dot com bubble was bursting, but big tech hadn’t coalesced into five or six titanic monoliths. It was a time when many futures seemed possible, even one where a tiny startup could win the coming smartphone wars.