The Obituary
Palm, founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, defined the handheld computer with the PalmPilot in 1996, putting a calendar, contacts, and notes in millions of pockets and pioneering the personal digital assistant. Its devices and Palm OS dominated the PDA market into the early 2000s. But the company stumbled through spin-offs and mergers and was slow to make the leap to smartphones. By the time it released the well-reviewed webOS platform and the Palm Pre in 2009, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android had already taken the market. Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 and discontinued its hardware soon after.
Worth remembering
- The PalmPilot, launched in 1996, made the personal digital assistant a mainstream device.
- Its 2009 webOS and Palm Pre won critical praise but arrived too late to challenge the iPhone and Android.
Sources
- Palm was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 after losing the smartphone market to the iPhone and Android Wikipedia
- The Palm Pilot popularized the personal digital assistant in the 1990s Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.