Handspring VisorPhone
Meet my first PDA phone… the Handspring VisorPhone! Pen Computing’s review of it from January 2001 is still online; you can read it here. Keep an eye out for the profile shot of the VisorPhone resting on an outside table — that’ll give you an idea of how ungainly it was.
Just so we’re all on the same page here, Handspring was the breakaway licensee of Palm OS devices headed by inventor Jeff Hawkins. The distinguishing feature of the company’s first-generation products was the SpringBoard expansion slot. So while the VisorPhone was technically an accessory you needed a HandSpring device to run it. And near as I remember that device more or less had to be the Prism Color, due to it’s faster processor, colour screen and rechargeable batteries.
[…] Handspring’s 2000 Color Visor with an attached mobile phone module—essentially, a VisorPhone. It was technically my first-ever smartphone (PDA phones qualified as smartphones back then) and […]