Hardware wallet without a hardware wallet I want to do some research in order to purchase a hardware wallet. Until I have decided what to do, I would like to transfer my bitcoin balance out of the exchange that I am currently using. I want to avoid multiple transfers, so what I would like to do it to transfer to an address which can be "imported" into my future hardware wallet. Here is my question:

How can I manage a software wallet which is compatible with any of the existing hardware wallets? Are hardware wallets following open standards to generate the bitcoin addresses, or are those proprietary? What standards are they following?
Create a seed outside a hardware wallet and then importing it in this latter doesn't make any sense. Hardware wallets have a strong security because the seed is generated by themselves and never revealed outside. I would recommend to wait for your hardware wallet and then generate and transfer your coins on it. 

If you know the risk and still want to generate a wallet outside, then you can import it to hardware wallets thanks to the 24 words seed. Make sure your software implements BIP39.

These are the standards implemented by both Trezor and Ledger wallets:


BIP 16 : P2SH serialized script addresses
BIP 32 : hierarchical Deterministic Wallets
BIP 39 : seed mnemonic
BIP 44 : specific wallet structure