THE VIDEO SHELF · handspring treo history
Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone (Full Documentary)
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.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN recommends it as an interview-rich history of Handspring, Palm OS and why telcos hurt early smartphones.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- The Verge
- Topic
- handspring treo history
- Format
- documentary
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 3
- HN mentions in dataset
- 6
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2022–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
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 …
roywiggins on Hacker News · 2022-02
In IBM SimonRight, it was ex-Palm employees at Handspring that created the Treo. Nice documentary about this with interviews: [VIDEO]
pushedx on Hacker News · 2024-04
In PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOSHandspring 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])
throwaway74354 on Hacker News · 2024-04
In Palm OS and the devices that ran it
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.