Hand Held Products (previously HHP) was a US electronics manufacturer, established in 1981 in North Carolina. The company was a manufacturer of linear and 2D handheld barcode scanners based on imaging technology. Its product range included rugged mobile computers, image kiosks, and barcode verification devices. Its range of data collection and communication products were designed for mobile, on-site, and transaction processing applications. In 2007, the company was subsumed into the

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

Group.

History

The Hand Held Products company, established in 1981 in

Charlotte Charlotte ( ) is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont (United States), Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Meckl ...

, North Carolina, began as a manufacturer of memory modules for

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

and

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

programmable calculators, and grew rapidly from 1983 thanks to an RFP hand-off by Hewett-Packard, as the package delivery company

Federal Express FedEx Corporation, formerly Federal Express Corporation and later FDX Corporation, is an American multinational conglomerate holding company focused on transportation, e-commerce and business services based in Memphis, Tennessee. The name "Fe ...

selected their Micro-Wand portable data collection device to begin a

proof of delivery Proof of delivery (POD) is a method to establish the fact that a recipient received contents sent by a sender. When the sender sends multiple documents through the mail, there is a possibility of some not reaching the intended recipient. Generall ...

system for package tracking. In 1996, Hand Held Products launched a mobile computer with 2D imaging technology, the Dolphin 7200. In 1997, the Hand Held Product's Dolphin portable computer was selected by the

United States Postal Service The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the U ...

to be part of their proof of delivery system, although a third party provided the manufacturing. The deal was the industry's largest ever single order, at 300,000 units. In 2006–2007

started replacing these portable computers with Motorola portable computers (370,000 units), which had bar code reading hardware (2D imager) and decoding and image processing software designed and supplied by Hand Held Products. The company became HHP in late 1999, following a merger with Welch Allyn Data Collection, a subsidiary of

Welch Allyn Welch Allyn, Inc. is an American manufacturer of medical devices and patient monitoring systems. Headquartered in Skaneateles Falls, New York, it was family-owned until it was acquired in 2015 by Hillrom. Hillrom was purchased by Baxter Internati ...

formed in 1972, which by the 1990s was manufacturing a complete line of handheld

bar code A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, Machine-readable data, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly refe ...

readers. From then, the company had its company headquarters in New York. Hand Held Products had a significant presence in Europe, with its EMEA headquarters and European repair center in

Eindhoven Eindhoven () is a city and municipality in the Netherlands, located in the southern province of North Brabant of which it is its largest. With a population of 238,326 on 1 January 2022,Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

to be purchased for $390 million. On December 20, 2007 Honeywell’s acquisition of Hand Held was approved, and Hand Held became a new line of business within the Honeywell Security Group, initially called Honeywell Imaging and mobility. With Honeywell's acquisition of Metrologic in 2008 they renamed the business unit Honeywell Scanning and Mobility.

References

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External links

Honeywell Scanning and Mobility
1981 establishments in North Carolina 2007 disestablishments in North Carolina American companies established in 1981 American companies disestablished in 2007 Automatic identification and data capture Computer companies established in 1981 Computer companies disestablished in 2007 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies