Palm Inc

Founded in 1992, the Palm brand is associated with manufacturing personal digital assistants (PDAs). The company became famous after designing PalmPilot, the first successfully marketed PDA in the world. Since its founding, the company has been through several mergers and acquisitions. For a period of time, the Palm brand almost evaporated from the tech industry but then in 2014 the operations again started after an acquisition. Palm Inc is also known for developing the Treo 600, one of the first smartphones, and several versions of Palm OS. HP acquired Palm in 2010 but after a year decided to discontinue the Palm brand. Again in 2014, HP sold the Palm trademark to TCL Corporation and the latter announced its plan to revive the brand. 

The Original Palm Brand

In 1992, Jeff Hawkins incorporated the Palm brand and shortly brought Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan into the team. These three people are the main brains behind the invention of PalmPilot. When Palm was born, it wrote software for a consumer PDA, Zoomer. Casio was the manufacturer of this PDA and the Zoomer devices were distributed by Casio and GRiD. Palm mainly played the role of offering the PIM software. Though in a few years, Zoomer became a huge turndown, Palm stayed in business by selling software for HP devices. In 1995, Palm was acquired by U.S. Robotics Corp and after a couple of years, the latter was acquired by 3Com. So, Palm became a subsidiary of 3Com and the original founders left the company. 

Splitting Of The Company 

In 2000, Palm became an independent publicly-traded company as 3Com decided to take it public. Palm’s IPO was filed during the dot-com bubble so within a year the price of shares dropped and lost 90% of their value. In June 2001, Palm became the worst performing PDA manufacturer that was listed on the NASDAQ. After a year, Palm established a wholly-owned subsidiary, PalmSource for developing and licensing Palm OS. PalmSource and Palm became two different companies but the Palm trademark was held by a jointly owned holding company. By the end of 2003, the hardware division of the business merged with Handspring, and the business was renamed as palmOne Inc. 

After a couple of years, palmOne purchased PalmSource’s share in the common trademark for $30 million. Thus, the brand name of palmOne was changed to Palm Inc, bringing back the old brand name. In the same year, PalmSource was acquired by a company called ACCESS. The new Palm Inc started a partnership with Verizon and Microsoft in 2006 to release Palm Treo 700w. The company entered into a strategic partnership with Elevation Partners who purchased a 25% equity stake in Palm.  In 2008, the CEO of the company announced that Palm would no longer develop any new handheld PDAs. In early 2009, the share price increased to the WebOS hype but again dropped after a year. 

Acquisition By HP

In April 2010, HP announced that it would be purchasing Palm for $1.2 billion and the deal was completed two months later. After a year, HP unfolded a new line of WebOS products but they were not under the brand name Palm. In 2011, HP also decided to discontinue the use of the Palm brand and after a few months ended the production of all Palm and WebOS services. After this decision, many Palm staff members started leaving HP. In 2014, the Palm brand name resurfaced again as HP sold the trademark to a shelf company, a regional president of TCL Corporation. In 2015, TCL confirmed the acquisition of the Palm brand and that Palm would be recreated by a team in Silicon Valley.

About Jeff Hawkins 

Jeff Hawkins is the founder of both Palm Inc and Handspring. He studied electrical engineering at Cornell University and started working for GRiD Systems in 1982. After founding Palm and Handspring, Jeff co-founded Numenta in 2005 along with Dubinsky and Dileep George. Jeff has also made contributions in the field of neuroscience and founded Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience in 2002.