The Hand Held Products company, established in 1981 in Charlotte, North Carolina, began as a manufacturer of memory modules for Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments programmable calculators, and grew rapidly from 1983 thanks to an RFP hand-off by Hewett-Packard, as the package delivery company Federal Express selected their Micro-Wand portable data collection device to begin a proof of delivery system for package tracking.
In 1997, the Hand Held Product's Dolphin portable computer was selected by the United States Postal Service to be part of their proof of delivery system, although a third party provided the manufacturing.
[citation needed] In 2006–2007 United States Postal Service 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.
Hand Held Products had a significant presence in Europe, with its EMEA headquarters and European repair center in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
It also has offices in the UK, Germany and France and sales representation and resellers in most countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.