Palm Inc. is a PDA and Smartphone manufacturer that has its HQs in California. It is famous for products like Palm Pilot, Palm III, Palm V, Palm VII, Zire, Tungsten PDAs, Treo smartphones and the LifeDrive. Now, the new Palm webOS will be replacing the older Palm OS Garnet.

Credit: daylife

The company suffered great loss of over $500 million last year, which made people think that it was the end of Palm. Anyhow, Palm needed to stand up again, and for standing up again it needed a remarkable new gadget. The company did not lose courage, and its continuous struggle resulted in “Pre”; one of the most speculated and anticipated mobile phones of 2009, like iPhone.

Pre is a device that has come into being after years of Palm’s struggle. I mean that all those Palm PDAs that we do not see these days are the forefathers of Pre. Therefore, they are worth mentioning. Let us rewind the time to 1992….

History:

• Palm Computing, Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins. He was an electrical engineer who had a previous experience of working on pen computing technology for GriD Systems. Company was founded to manufacture a PDA for consumers called Zoomer. Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan were there to work with Hawkins.
• In 1993, Zoomer; the first product of Palm was released. It was also known as Casio Z-7000 and Tandy Z-PDA because Casio manufactured it and Tandy was the marketer. Palm was the provider of PIM software, whereas Geoworks provided the OS. Unfortunately, Zoomer was a commercial failure.
• 1994 was the year when Hawkins realized that he should concentrate on developing enhanced handwriting recognition technology. Graffiti system was the speedy and astonishingly precise result of Hawkins’ great effort.
• U.S. Robotics Corp acquired Palm Computing, Inc. in 1995.
• 1996 brought Palm’s first own PDA called the Palm Pilot 1000. It possessed the above mentioned Graffiti user interface, a 16MHz processor, a 160×160 monochrome screen and 128K of memory. It became a heartthrob for corporate users.
• The Pilot 1000 was followed by Palm Pilot 5000, Palm Pilot Personal and Palm Pilot Professional. For using the name “Pilot”, Pen Pilot sued the company.
• In 1997, U.S. Robotics Corp was     acquired by 3Com, making Palm a subsidiary of 3Com.
• 1998 made the founders of Palm unhappy with the direction in which 3Com was taking them, thus they left the company. Hawkins then formed the Handspring.
• Qualcomm and Sony became pretty enticed by Palm OS, which featured in Qualcomm’s pdQ handset and Sony’s Clie series of handhelds.
• In 2000, Palm was turned into an independent publicly traded company by 3Com.
• In 2002, it developed its software business separately called PalmSource.
• 2002 also brought the smartphone line of Palm into existence. First among these were the colored-screen Treo 270, the candybar Treo 600, the camera-bearing Treo 650, the WinMo Treo 700 and the streamlined Palm Centro.
• PDA development was stopped by the company in 2008.
• 2008 brought a second quarter $506.2 million loss for Palm.

2009:

It was 2009 when the company began standing up on its feet once again. The announcement of Pre and webOS has made the tech world restless. But the impatience has ended as the Pre is now available. This was a precise note of Palm Inc. history. In spite of everything, the company has managed to survive, rather Live!!!

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