Palm (PDA)

Palm is a 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. 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 where previous attempts such as Apple's Newton failed or others like Hewlett-Packard's 200LX only serving a niche target market. 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, but discontinued its hardware later that same year. 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.