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Image:ZDNet
The brand Palm conjures up a lot of memories for me. It’s responsible for many relationships I have made in my life, ones that I continue to maintain to this very day.
In fact, I met ZDNet columnist David Gewirtz and his (future) wife, Denise Amrich because of it. Back in the late 90s, he ran a series of online publications about mobile devices — one of those was PalmPower Magazine, which later became Computing Unplugged.
It was a very early attempt at online dynamic content creation in an age when print publications were still very much viable.
Also: Crash of the mobile titans: What happened to Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia, and HTC?
Along with a bunch of other authors, who I am still fairly close with, we delved into every aspect of mobile technology, including Windows CE and a lot of other things that no longer exist. Palm was a heavyweight, it was a seemingly unstoppable force.
Sure there were things like Apple Newton, and Sharp Zaurus, and a few other esoteric PDA platforms, but when you compare it to the inertia of Palm Computing, nothing came even close to the ecosystem of apps and accessories that platform had.
I loved my Palm devices. I had original Palms, I had Handsprings. I had TRG Pros. I had the original Qualcomm PalmOS smartphone. I had the SONY version. Over the course of a decade, I probably went through 20 or 30 of the things, up until the point it got color, got wireless, and was ported from the Motorola Dragonball 68000 to the ARM platform.
It was like iOS and the Android of its day, all in one.
But like many technologies it fell by the wayside, it got stale. Windows CE came. RIM and BlackBerry wiped the floor with it. Then iPhone came. And then Android.
The brand and the company got tossed around so many times and intertwined with all kinds of crazy acquisitions and asset separations between the hardware and software (3Com, Be, Access Systems, TCL, etc) it became hard to figure out who owned it and what it was.
Palm had a brief renaissance with Pre and WebOS. HP finally picked it up, decided to chase iPad, and it crashed and burned with the TouchPad. I think WebOS is inside TVs at LG someplace now. There are open source remnants out there as well.
But Palm is back. The brand is now being resurrected by a bunch of folks out in San Francisco in partnership with TCL, and Verizon Wireless.
But it is a brand resurrection only. The device they are releasing is a smartphone “companion.” It runs Android and regular apps, but the thing is tiny with a low power Qualcomm 435 SoC. It’s credit card sized, with a 3.3″ display. It has an LTE radio, 3GB of RAM and 32GB storage, with WiFi and Bluetooth, front and rear cameras, but it’s more like a smartwatch than a smartphone.