Palm (PDA)

For other uses, see Palm (disambiguation).
The Palm TX from 2005
An early model—the PalmPilot Personal

Palm is a now discontinued line of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones developed by California-based Palm, Inc., originally called Palm Computing, Inc. Palm devices are often remembered as "the first wildly popular handheld computers," responsible for ushering in the smartphone era.[1]

The first Palm device, the PalmPilot 1000, was released in 1996 and proved to be popular. It led a growing market for portable computing devices[2] where previous attempts such as Apple's Newton failed[3] or others like Hewlett-Packard's 200LX only serving a niche target market.[4]

Most of Palm's PDAs and mobile phones ran the in-house Palm OS software which was later also licensed to other OEMs. A few devices ran on Microsoft's Windows Mobile. In 2009 Palm OS's successor webOS was released, first shipping with the Palm Pre. In 2011 Hewlett-Packard discontinued the Palm brand and started releasing new devices under the HP brand,[5] but discontinued its hardware later that same year.[6]

In 2018, a start-up backed by TCL Corporation (owner of the Palm brand) released a new device simply called Palm, although in essence it bears no relation to the original Palm devices.[7]

  1. ^ "The PalmPilot - CHM Revolution". www.computerhistory.org. Retrieved 2018-10-09.
  2. ^ "A Brief History of Palm". PCWorld. Retrieved 2018-10-14.
  3. ^ "Palm Pilot".
  4. ^ "Palm Inc | Encyclopedia.com".
  5. ^ "HP announces smaller and larger Pre phones, kills Palm brand". ZDNet.
  6. ^ "Pre to postmortem: The inside story of the death of Palm and webOS". 5 June 2012.
  7. ^ "Palm is back (Sort of), and it built a tiny smartphone sidekick". 15 October 2018.