Springboard Announcement: The Verge’s Documentary About The Forgotten History Of The Treo



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A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a small team of renegades envisioned and tried to build the modern smartphone. Almost forgotten by history, a small startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In Springboard: the secret story of the first real smartphone, The edgeDieter Bohn talks to the visionaries of Handspring and dives into their early successes and possible failures.

This is a half hour documentary starring the main actors of Palm and Handspring: Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, Ed Colligan, and more. This is one of our most ambitious video projects to date, and we can’t wait to show it to you.

Handspring may not be a household name anymore, but it was briefly one of the fastest growing companies in American history, selling Visor personal digital assistants. But the company had bigger aspirations: It saw a mobile future and took the first steps towards what would become the modern smartphone, even as it faced skepticism from the entire industry.

The Handspring Treo dream turned out too far ahead of its time – before the technology inside smartphones or the industry that sold them was ready for it. And a number of bad internal decisions and external catastrophes would block Handspring long enough for Apple to continue doing what Handspring couldn’t.

Springboard is also a glimpse into an earlier era in tech – when the dot com bubble burst, but big tech didn’t coalesce into five or six titanic monoliths. It was a time when many futures seemed possible, even one where a small startup could win the upcoming smartphone wars.

Springboard premieres Monday, October 25, The edgeThe new TV app on streaming devices: Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV (Apple TV coming soon). To look for The edge app on your streaming device or find out how to download it here.

If you want to be the first to see it, Springboard will also screen in New York on Saturday, October 23, and we’ll be doing a live question-and-answer session right after. We hope you can make it happen! You can get tickets here.

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