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

[Applause] is a revolutionary we all know this story the iphone and then android revolutionized the smartphone world and changed the way that we use technology forever but there is a story before the story it's a story of a technology company that few people remember today it was called handspring and the people who founded it were among the first to realize that the simple phone would need to stop being just a phone that eventually it would become a computer i mean it's really going to happen every little pocket device in the future is going to have a fast inexpensive internet connection and you're going to use it for voice and data and transactions and so on this is the story of the people whose ideas are inside the phones that we use every day but those ideas came just a little too early over 20 years ago nobody believed them not the company that they worked at not the carriers that sold millions of phones a year not even steve jobs 30 miles south of san francisco lies silicon valley welcome to the land of the dot-com it's the 90s you've got mail aol is sending out cds to get on the internet hotmail is the hot new email service and getting online means listening to the screech of a 56k bps modem it was way before smartphones in other words instead we had personal digital assistants we called them pdas now these things didn't get on the internet wirelessly instead they were big gadgety organizers apple made one called the newton and it flopped microsoft kept trying to shrink a pc down into a handheld which was a bad idea really only one pda got it right it was called the palm pilot and it was a big hit a palm device is a little organizer it's actually a real computer that happens to be the most popular handheld computer there is right now got about 11 million people using them out there the team behind palm were true believers that a mobile revolution was coming jeff hawkins was the product mine behind the palm pilot donna dubinsky was the ceo and ed colligan handled marketing but palm ran into money problems early on so it was bought by us robotics a modem company which was then bought by 3com another modem company and the people who ran 3com were the first of many who didn't understand how important mobile would become that it was the future and dial up internet would soon be the past so we had been bought by us robotics and user products were bought by 3com and freecom didn't even know they were getting us there's like this little note on the side we had just gotten to the point where we just didn't feel that we could do our best work at palm anymore we'd been looking at the question of could we spin off palm into a separate entity we'd had a committee looking at it we'd had advisors gone through a whole analysis made a recommendation in the end of the day they came back and said we're never ever going to let you guys you know spin out so donna resigned for both of us that day consulting me first could have said well you didn't you didn't decide for me i'm out of here donna and i and we had kept this team together from the very start and we all personal commitments to each other it wasn't a jolt so much as a logical next step when we wanted to have an independent company and they didn't want us to have that as a part of 3com we'd had such success at palm that one of the venture capitalists literally wrote a check to jeff saying i'm invested before we had a set of slides i mean he just said whatever you're doing i want in so we left to form handspring they left because they saw just how big an opportunity mobile would be it's the beginning of a big new industry it's the next generation of computing then when we got to handspring we needed to come up with some way of differentiating from palm yeah we built a 90 share of the market we own the market for handheld computers at palm how do you break into that what differentiation do you have and that was jeff's genius idea of creating this thing called the springboard slot the springboard slot is this module on the back of the visor pda pdas at the time couldn't do the stuff that we expect out of our gadgets today there was no music no cameras no storage expansion and no wireless radios none of that was figured out yet and the only way to figure it out was to experiment to let anybody make springboard modules and for handspring to try out some of their own and see what worked peter skillman came on board at handspring to help design the hardware which was no easy feat back then we were trying to have the springboard module and the whole idea of an expanding platform was a really new idea and do it in a way that actually makes the experience much faster much better so i looked at the game boy and we said oh well that's a plug thing too so we could we could expand this all kinds of stuff you could plug in not only hardware components but you can plug in software and a backup card slot could be for anything in fact there were very clever modules that people did in the slot one of the first camera phones was in the slot done by ideo my favorite was the guy who came up with a dental floss holder for the slot there was a kick-ass module that i had it was the soundsgood module it was an mp3 player that you would plug in to the back and then you would have your mp3 interface on the front this thing became a music player all the stuff that you take for granted on your phone today it's a camera it plays music it can connect to the internet it can have lots of storage none of that was possible on pdas at the time but it all became possible on the visor through these little expansion modules so we're pretty excited about launching the visor now this could have been a total coincidence 3com decided to announce that they were spinning off palm into a separate company now this was what we had wanted to do when we were still at three columns right and they said no we're not going to do that so it seemed like a bit of a slap in the face but it didn't dampen our enthusiasm too much we went ahead and launched the visor probably the bigger issue for the launch was that we decided that we would want to sell this product on the internet but the web was really immature at the time it was more brochure where you could put up a pretty page about what were the characteristics of your product but actually taking an order and processing it was very immature and we created the system and it just didn't work our website melted down we were shipping 10 units to customer ordered one i mean it was it was the craziest thing ever we took lots of orders and when it came to shipping them we just couldn't match orders with shipments and payments with orders and we had an absolute mess on our hands but the business was blowing up we took off like a rocket everybody wanted this product people wanted the visor because they liked the idea that they could expand it with those modules even though the reality was very few people actually bought them mostly it was less expensive and more fun than palms pdas handsprings visor has carved out its own niche as well thanks in part to their unique springboard expansion technology today handspring is the up-and-comer in the pda market the business continued to scale i mean the whole market was exploding it was at that point in the first couple of quarters the fastest growth company in american business history i mean this sounds kind of corny but we look back at it we felt it was like a camelot period when you're that exhilarated and you come to work jazzed every day that's rob haitani he was a designer of the palm software interface that was so legendarily simple and easy to use that it got a nickname the zen of palm there was a sense like a particular beginning getting the band back together and then we knew what we were doing and we had confidence donna ed i mean they were mentors they were cheerleaders it was really more like a family we were always celebrating things and doing fun things you know i remember those one day we walk in in the cafeteria there was a woman who had a handspring logo tattooed on her ankle you love your company so much you put a permanent mark on your skin incoming we were all friends we hung out we had a summer picnic and director and pr said hey let's put a band together people loved us and it became a thing we had like a fan club that just reflected the culture like you could lean on people and you could trust people and you could just do ridiculously crazy things because why not we all wanted to build great products we worked hard on creating the sort of culture of a place that we wanted to work in the visor was a big success in the pda market but the important context to keep in mind is that the pda market was tiny handspring kept churning out visors faster visors color screen visors thinner visors and visors with more memory but everybody knew that the pda market had an expiration date and besides selling pdas wasn't the real opportunity [Music] the core thing that we thought we wanted to do was to create wireless modules we really felt the future of handheld computing was going to be wireless that we were ultimately going to get to what became known as a smartphone the industry was dominated by nokia motorola and ericsson and they were billion-dollar businesses and they had all the propriety technology there weren't chips that you could go buy you couldn't go to the market and say build me one of these things just that audacity of a group of eight people making a phone you know it's like eight people like a dinner party yeah so imagine your next dinner party and the host says hey let's make a phone if we'd integrated every one of the radios that was going on through that whole path we would have for sure gone out of business it would have been so expensive would have been a bunch of devices we wouldn't have sold with the module we could try all these things the other thing about the visor is every single one of them from the jump from the very first one had this tiny little hole here for a microphone but you couldn't do anything with it and that's because they knew from the beginning that they wanted to make this thing so you would slap this into the back and turn this pda into a phone [Music] it has its own radio its own battery its own speaker even its own ringer switch it's huge and it's silly but it was also necessary because back when this was made it was basically a beta test to see if it was even possible to take a pda and turn it into a smartphone these phones were terrible why we bought you know the radio from an outside vendor it was very hard to integrate it was not very reliable the first visor phone was almost a prototype product sometimes you gotta create an experiment a little bit before you get to what you think is the ultimate integration and visorphone helped us do that around the same time another company was making a comeback imac has become the number one selling computer in america steve jobs had captured the world's imagination with candy-colored imax back then apple was far from becoming the titan that it is today in the 90s it was still small enough that jobs had to keep the company focused on the mac so he had discontinued apple's newton pda and gotten out of the handheld business entirely now one of the reasons that palm os pdas like the visor had beat the newton was that they could easily sync with any pc and the executives at handspring wanted to make sure the visor could also sync well with the mac so they set up a meeting with steve jobs we had already heard that steve jobs didn't like our products he thought there were toys or whatever and we show up and we were blown away because as soon as we walk into the executive office we see everyone it's got these landings around their neck with this laminated cards of addresses and names and phone numbers and it's like really geeky looking and we asked them i said why is that and they and one of the people whispers is because steve jobs won't let anyone have upon pilot he forbids it he doesn't want to see them i'm like oh great this meeting's getting off to a great start right the really interesting part of that meeting was the dynamic between jeff who's a brilliant thinker visionary high execution product guy and steve who's a brilliant thinker visionary high execution product guy at one point steve got up to the white board and he said here's what the future's going to look like so he draws a macintosh on the board and he puts a circle around and he puts a bunch of spokes out of the mac and he puts photos music web this is our strategy the mac's gonna be the center of our universe and all these applications are gonna hang off it you're gonna be able to do everything movies music video off of the mac we believe the pc will be the hub not just adding value to each of these devices but interconnecting them as well so i get on the buy system i think you're wrong i got up and i wrote on the board next to his and i said okay we have a different viewing feature he got up and he drew a palm pilot here's a handheld computer in the center around there's going to be music and documents and the web and all this someone you know thinks about what they need to take with them that's the thing they're going to take and they're going to use it far more often so these were competing visions of how these things were gonna evolve and i think this was still the time where steve was saying publicly that they would not do a phone what about an ipod phone which i desperately want please thank you very much it's a hard problem was that the light bulb that went off saying we should go do the iphone i have been told and i don't know if there's any truth to this that right after that meeting steve got serious about building an iphone [Music] wall street has been roaring away to record high numbers for months now but as one record follows another the markets become increasingly nervous for the third consecutive day billions of pounds have been wiped off the value of the world's stock markets convincing steve jobs about the future of mobile was very far from the top of handsprings worries another thing that was happening in the early 2000s was the bursting of the dot-com bubble and that was going to force some very hard choices there were several problems that happened at once there was a stock market crash and there was a recession and when things turn sometimes they turn really bad and that turned into to be the dot-com crash that was a you know enormous world of hurt obviously for the country in general but for our market specifically it was just a product that fell lower on your desire list when you had less money literally happened about six months after we went public so we had this roaring growth incredible public offering created a lot of wealth and it just cratered but despite the frenzy to buy shares in lastminute.com many analysts expressed doubts about the true value of the business palm ended up with a bit of an excess inventory problem so they started lowering prices unfortunately just kept going and then we started having an inventory problem and then it became very difficult to raise money and that led to some decisions we had to make one of which was to what we call burn the boats you know we couldn't do the handheld business and do the trio we made the decision we're gonna go for the future trio is the most amazing tool i have ever used this is the future of communications the idea that you could access the world's information right from your pocket i mean that was just an extraordinary thing at the time it seemed so logical today but it was wild the idea that you could be out with your device and look up a map or look up an address or something we saw texting early on and multimedia messaging happening and knew that that was going to be important by today's standards the trio is pretty ridiculous the plastic is cheap there's this totally weird and unnecessary flip lid it has a physical qwerty keyboard and it even has an antenna sticking out of the top of it for god's sake and also this isn't the very first smartphone it's not even the very first smartphone that ran the palm operating system but the thing is everything before the trio just didn't get what a smartphone should be it should be powerful enough to run apps but simple enough for anybody to use another example of the genius of jeff is to say okay here's a pda that's this big and here's a phone that's that big how do we combine these and his first thought is let's make something smaller than either of them if i made it a little bit smaller and i replace this with a keyboard then i'm there packed into this relatively tiny package are a lot of the ideas that we take for granted in our phones today the phone app has big touchable buttons for your speed dial when you want to call somebody that wasn't one of these favorites you can just type on the keyboard to search for their name what about the ringer switch the idea of the ringer switch you can feel it in your pocket you can flip the switch and you can be guaranteed that the phone's not going to make any sounds for anything so i said this is obvious interestingly enough the competition thought it was stupid phones at that time had things called profiles and you could set multiple profiles and there's an outdoor profile with this vibration setting and this volume setting and it's hardware by the way it's cost you're adding cost to the product i think the thing that people don't realize is just how nascent this technology was in those days you put a web browser on the trio and was the web ready for a mobile phone at all at that point no the web was not the least bit ready for it in fact i have a very clear memory of looking up google the first time on the handheld and it just it was a disaster it didn't reformat for the small screen so you you know you you couldn't find the text you had to try to scroll all over if you can imagine it as a little window on a big screen it just didn't work so i went over to google and i met with them i can't remember actually whether it was larry page or sergey brin i think it was larry and i showed it to him and i said look we we need to be able to do this and it doesn't work and he immediately went and got it fixed it was like the next time i looked at it it was working so they just hadn't contemplated people using google on a little teeny device but as soon as they saw it they went oh yeah that's gonna happen none of these features seem like a big deal right today they're not every phone can do this stuff but in 2001 these ideas were new handspring thought them up and if they hadn't who knows how long it would have taken for somebody else to come up with all of it one of jeff hawkins incredible talents is being able to look where he wants to be 10 years from now and then backing down to what he can do today based on today's technology to increment his way there making a smartphone back then wasn't easy but selling it would be even harder the only companies that could make any phone a success were the companies that actually sold the phones working with the carriers was definitely one of the most difficult things the carriers did not get smartphones the thing to remember is that before the iphone the carriers had almost total control over what happened on phones not just which phones were sold but how they worked and what they were allowed to do handspring had the vision but they couldn't build the phone that they wanted so instead they built the phone that they could sometimes these deals were so big you're talking about the survival of the company the degree of gamesmanship can get so intense yeah your entire dream will fail unless you agree to put this app on your launcher they were interested in adding features to their phones they didn't view it as a computer they said it's a phone everyone's got on phones and phones are dominant and we were thinking no the future is going to be these are going to be computers and the phone is a an app i remember clearly going to sprint and saying great idea now guess what you can take a photo right on this thing and send it to somebody and they said nah we don't want to do that our other devices can't do that they also were one of the principal resellers of the product it went through their stores we made the first products and they wouldn't sell them they said no we can't we're not gonna sell these things you have to make the following changes okay now those first products they included the trio 180 a version with graffiti instead of a physical keyboard called the 180 g and later a color version called the 270. handspring got some interest from sprint but it had to spend nearly an entire year redoing the phone to work on sprint's cdma radio network so the trio 300 came later but the truth is they weren't selling in big enough numbers that carriers wouldn't sell them and those that did demanded changes that hampered the software experience there was potential in these phones but it was unrealized handspring just had to try again the very first couple trios were not that successful it took a couple of rounds for us to get a reasonable device that operated well the radios had to get better the quality had to get better and i think just people had to get more comfortable with the idea and even in the early 2000s you could tell that this first trio was not the right shape the second iteration of the trio was simpler and better it was the trio 600 and it featured an sms app that actually threaded your conversations into a single screen instead of making you jump between an inbox and an outbox and an inbox and an outbox which is how messaging worked before the trio the trio 600 was the first of what would become the shape of trios for years to come and it was the first to get more interest from the carriers but time and money were both running out competitors were coming and the economy was crashing and then things were about to get even worse handspring ended up in a weakened position i had signed a massive lease for two buildings under construction in sunnyvale the problem was is that it was huge new debt in the face of a rapidly worsening financial situation and it became very clear that we needed to get out of that lease and the only way to get out of that lease was to make a pretty major payment i really view that lease as the the biggest mistake i've made in my career it was it was devastating for us we were running out of money and we had to do something to me that was the fundamental decision how long would handspring as an independent company last on 40 million dollars nobody at handspring wanted to make that decision everybody wanted to remain independent everybody wanted to go on our own the only real serious acquirer that was interested was pom we and pom had really grown in complementary ways we had gone off in the direction of communications which they hadn't done at all and they were just realizing that they needed to do we found ourselves like the two parts of the same company so coming back together was a pretty easy product fit at that point if handspring selling itself to palm sounds distracting that's not even the half of it the history of palm and handspring is a history of corporate mergers spin-offs and screw-ups just think of all of the fiascos that jeff donna and ed had to go through just to get to this point they founded palm which was bought by u.s robotics which got bought by 3com 3com refused to spin off palm so donna and jeff quit to start handspring meanwhile their old company 3com finally did spin off palm but they split it into two divisions one for hardware and one to sell software the palm hardware division screwed up the market with excess inventory and the palm software division well it didn't accomplish very much at all handspring then runs out of money so the palm hardware division buys them but they refuse to buy back the palms software division so the family's back together again and they would continue to sell trios for years to come but the family drama isn't over here's what was going to happen next for paul jeff and donna would step away but ed colligan stayed on to give it another go at the new palm but that separate palm software company sold off and withered away so the new palm had to sell windows mobile trios and then start over again with new software called web os then they ran out of money and had to sell to hp and then hp finally killed palm oh and there's one more thing that really needs to go on this timeline this is a day i've been looking forward to for two and a half years this is one device and we are calling it iphone [Music] what do you think it was about the iphone that let it break through it's a tricky question yeah well first of all i was out of the business at that time and i could see as soon as they announced the product i could see that it was going to be very successful i know that many people think somehow the device was magical oh they created touch screens no they didn't create touch screens a lot of the things they did weren't new and they were missing a lot of features in the beginning we we could look up a name and the address book is like you know you type three letters and there it is and you know they had this little tabs on the side and had to go click on the end and then scroll pages it was just like they were imitating paper but on the other hand i think they they sort of nailed the ultimate form factor the iphone did some things that felt magical because they had the courage to build the supply chain to make that possible apple has done the most incredible job of like buying entire supply chains it takes a level of investment and commitment that very few companies can do they totally totally redefined the relationship with the carrier we would never get a product like that past a carrier if we tried to present that to care they wouldn't buy it from us because it was just too different and we were constantly constrained they had i think at the time 100 million itunes customers they could walk into a carrier and go would you like new customers because when i bring them this product they are going to want it and it'll be on your network right that was a pretty compelling argument okay to say you're gonna take what we're gonna deliver when we'd walk in we'd have 10 million pom users maybe and verizon had 100 million wireless customers and they'd say do you want our 100 million verizon customers and we'd say yes and they'd say well then you're gonna put this email on that was the difference in the conversation now there's some hyperbole and ed's numbers there but the point stands apple just had way more leverage while handspring was struggling to invent the phones of the future with just the resources it could cobble together right away apple was developing in secret with a skunk works iphone project that was funded by the mac scrappy only gets you so far if we had not built palm would steve jobs have lived long enough to develop the iphone he was smart enough to realize you know after the newton that okay this this isn't ready and and we won't do this until we're ready and then did we lay the groundwork where he said okay now it's ready now i'm gonna step in with a totally different vision and kick their ass that is the question isn't it what would phones look like today if the pioneers at handspring hadn't tried to invent the future before the world was ready for it how much longer would it have taken to get to this when i look at the trio i don't just see an old gadget one that i admittedly have a lot of nostalgia for i see a vision for the way that we use technology today just trapped in this primitive shell this phone had apps for ebooks and games and directions and email and calendar and music all of it five years before the iphone if a company's products don't succeed is the company a failure if the company itself goes out of business does that mean that they had the wrong ideas my good answer to these questions was yes but that was before i met the people who made handspring these lifelong friends they pursued a vision together and even though their influence on the technology industry has been obscured by the mythology of monoliths like apple it doesn't change the fact that whether we realize it or not handspring's ideas are still with us today sitting right in our pockets [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: The Verge

Views: 312,294

Keywords: smartphone, treo, history of smartphones, springboard, documentary, tech documentary, apple, treo phone, steve jobs, handspring, iPhone, phone documentary, dieter bohn, dieter bohn the verge, cell phones, smartphones 2020, best smartphone, smartphones, history, technology history timeline, first look, hands on, review, technology, gadgets, tech, latest, tech news, verge, the verge

Id: b9_Vh9h3Ohw

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/martinkem]

What makes these Springboard devices the first real smartphones as opposed to the Nokia Communicators which debuted in 1996?

[u/LankeeM9]

A revolutionary product requires a revolutionary marketing strategy, alot of people forget this.

I thank Apple for destroying the power of the carriers.

The iPhones finger based touch interface that didn't use a resistive screen was absolutely effortless to use.

The keyboard was one of the biggest things that blew my mind, the fact that the size of they keyboard keys would change based on what was being typed to improve accuracy.

I don't think any Android keyboard even does this.

Apple's autocorrect may be horrible but I can type extremely fast on their tiny keyboard.