Hand Held Products
Hand Held Products was the world's largest 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.
The company was created in a merger between the former Welch Allyn Data Collection, Inc. and Hand Held Products, Inc. in late 1999.
Welch Allyn Data Collection was formed in 1972 as a subsidiary of Welch Allyn, headquartered in Skaneateles Falls, New York, and by the 1990s was manufacturing a complete line of handheld bar code readers.
The original Hand Held Products company, established in 1981 in Charlotte, North Carolina, began life as a manufacturer of memory modules for Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments programmable calculators, but quickly came to the industry spotlight in 1983 thanks to an RFP hand-off by Hewett-Packard, as a package delivery company Federal Express selected their Micro-Wand portable data collection device to begin its first major proof of delivery system for package tracking.
In 1996, Hand Held Products launched the first 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 to be part of their own proof of delivery system, although a third party provided the manufacturing for this deal, which was the largest single order in the history of the industry – 300,000 units.
In 2006–2007 United States Postal Service started replacing these portable computers with newly designed Motorola portable computers (370,000 units). The bar code reading hardware (2D imager) and decoding and image processing software in these new portable computers are designed and supplied by Hand Held Products.
In the UK, many companies including the courier Amtrak, Christian Salvesen logistics and retail outlet Snow & Rock use various models of the handheld computers.
Since the merger in 1999, the company has maintained its company headquarters in NY.
Hand Held Products has a significant presence in Europe, with its EMEA headquarters in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where also its European repair center is based. It also has offices in the UK, Germany and France and sales representation and resellers in most countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Hand Held Products also has offices in Latin America and Asia.
As of January 1, 2005, the company dropped HHP as its brand name and returned to its full name Hand Held Products. (The legal company name has always been Hand Held Products, Inc.)
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On October 15, 2007, Hand Held Products announced they had entered an agreement with Honeywell to be purchased for a reported $390 M usd. On December 20, 2007 Honeywell’s acquisition of Hand Held was approved, and Hand Held officially became a part of Honeywell. Hand Held formed 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 decided to call the business unit Honeywell Scanning and Mobility.
