PALM, INC.

'Palm, Inc.' is a personal digital assistant manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that is responsible for popular products such as the Zire, Tungsten PDAs, Treo smartphones and the LifeDrive. Previous product lines include the Palm Pilot, Palm III, Palm V and Palm VII. While most of their devices run Palm OS, a recent edition of the Treo runs Windows Mobile and the Palm Foleo, a mobile companion to the Treo, runs Linux.

Contents

History

List of PDA models

Current models

Discontinued models

See also

References

External links

History

Palm Computing, Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, later co-inventors of the Palm Pilot. Ed Colligan later joined the team. The company was started to create a PDA for consumers, called the 'Zoomer'. The devices were manufactured by Casio and marketed by Tandy, while Palm provided the PIM software. The operating system was provided Geoworks. The Zoomer failed commercially, but Palm managed to survive through selling synchronization software for HP devices, and the Graffiti handwriting recognition software for the Apple Newton MessagePad.
The company was acquired by U.S. Robotics Corp. in 1995. In June 1997, Palm became a subsidiary of 3Com when U.S. Robotics was acquired by 3Com. In June 1998, the founders became unhappy at the direction in which 3Com was taking the company, they left and founded Handspring. 3Com made the Palm subsidiary an independent, publicly traded company on March 2, 2000, and it traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol PALM.
In January 2002, Palm set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to develop and license Palm OS^[1], which was named PalmSource in February^[2]. PalmSource was then spun off from Palm as an independent company.
In August 2003, the hardware division of the company merged with Handspring, was renamed to palmOne, Inc. and traded under the ticker symbol PLMO. The Palm trademark was held by a jointly-owned holding company.
In April 2005, palmOne purchased PalmSource's share in the 'Palm' trademark for US$30 million.^[3] In July 2005, palmOne launched its new name and brand reverting back to Palm, Inc. and trading under the ticker symbol PALM once again.
On January 4, 2006, Palm released the Palm Treo 700w, the first Windows Mobile-powered Treo in a partnership with Verizon and Microsoft.
In December 2006, Palm, Inc. paid $44 million to ACCESS for the rights to the source code for Palm OS Garnet. With this arrangement, a single company is again developing palm hardware and software. Palm can modify the licensed software as needed and it need not pay royalties to ACCESS over future years.
On June 2007 Palm formed a strategic relationship with the private-equity firm Elevation Partners who has purchased a 25% equity stake of the company for $325 million – an investment that comes after months of rumours about a possible Palm sale and CEO Ed Colligan acknowledged that “"We were approached by larger parties over the last six months," and "the reality is that we thought this [Elevation] was the best outcome for our business and our investors."^[4]

List of PDA models

Current models

★ Z22 (Palm OS)

★ Tungsten E2 (Palm OS)

★ TX (WiFi, Palm OS)

★ Treo 680 (GSM, Palm OS)

★ Treo 700p (CDMA, Palm OS)

★ Treo 755p (CDMA , Palm OS)

★ Treo 700w (CDMA, Windows Mobile)

★ Treo 700wx (CDMA, Windows Mobile)

★ Treo 750 (GSM, Windows Mobile)

Discontinued models

The following PDAs are no longer in production.

'Discontinued Model'	'Replacement model'
Pilot 1000	Zire 31
Pilot 5000	Zire 31
PalmPilot Personal	Zire 31
PalmPilot Professional	Zire 31
Palm III	Zire 31
Palm IIIe	Zire 31
Palm IIIx	Zire 31
Palm IIIxe	Zire 31
Palm IIIc	Zire 31
Handspring Visor	Zire 31
Palm V	Tungsten E2
Palm Vx	Tungsten E2
Palm VII	Treo 700p
Palm VIIx	Treo 700p
Palm m100	Zire 31
Palm m105	Zire 31
Palm m125	Zire 31
Palm m130	Zire 31
Palm m500	Tungsten E2
Palm m505	Tungsten E2
Palm m515	Tungsten E2
Palm i705	Treo 700p
Tungsten E	Tungsten E2
Tungsten T	Palm TX
Tungsten T2	Palm TX
Tungsten T3	Palm TX
Tungsten T5	Palm TX
Tungsten W	Treo 700p
Zire	Z22
Zire 21	Z22
Zire 71	Zire 72
Handspring Treo 90	Treo 700p
Handspring Treo 180	Treo 700p
Handspring Treo 180g	Treo 700p
Handspring Treo 270	Treo 700p
Handspring Treo 300	Treo 700p
Treo 600	Treo 650/700p
Treo 650 (CDMA only)	Treo 700p/755p
Treo 650 (GSM only)	Treo 680
LifeDrive	Palm TX
Foleo	No Replacement

See also

★ PalmSource, Inc.

★ Palm Desktop

★ Palm OS

★ Handspring

★ Graffiti (Palm OS)

★ List of Palm OS Devices

★ Personal digital assistant

References

1. Palm Completes Formation of Palm OS Subsidiary as Palm Powered Devices Hit 20 Million Sold, Palm press release, January 21, 2002
2. Palm OS Subsidiary CEO Outlines Vision For Future Of Mobile Computing, Palm press release, February 5, 2002
3. [1]
4. [2]

External links

★ Palm's website

★ PalmInfocenter

★ 1src