WhereIsAtlas · Technology

What Happened to Palm?

Palm put a computer in a pocket and then lost the market to the phone. The company is gone, the brand is licensed to a mini handset, and its last great idea now runs LG televisions.

Palm, Inc. is defunct. It was founded in 1992, made the PalmPilot the first mass-market handheld computer, passed through U.S. Robotics and 3Com, and was spun off as a public company on 1 March 2000. Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2010 for $1.2 billion and ended Palm and webOS device production in August 2011. HP sold webOS to LG Electronics in 2013, where it became LG's smart television platform and is still shipped today, and sold the Palm trademark in 2014 to a shelf company tied to TCL Corporation. A small licensed Palm-branded phone is still sold through palm.com.

The short answer

The company is gone and the name is not. Palm, Inc. was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 and wound down in 2011; the trademark was sold in 2014 to a company tied to TCL Corporation and is still used on a small licensed Android phone; and the company's last piece of software, webOS, became the operating system inside LG televisions [1][3][5][14].

That is three different endings for three different parts of one company, and untangling them is most of what "what happened to Palm" means.

Starting with the Zoomer, which failed

Palm Computing was founded in January 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, who had been vice-president of Grid Systems and had designed its pen computers. Hawkins hired Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, and all three are credited with the PalmPilot [1][6].

The company's first product was not a device of its own. Palm wrote the personal-information software for the Zoomer, a consumer PDA built by Casio for Tandy and sold as the Casio Z-7000 and Tandy Z-PDA, with the PEN/GEOS operating system from Geoworks. It failed commercially [1][6].

Palm survived by selling software to other people's hardware: a synchronisation program for Hewlett-Packard devices and Graffiti, the single-stroke handwriting recognition system Hawkins had developed, licensed to Apple for the Newton MessagePad [1].

That history is worth keeping in view, because it explains the company's real talent. Palm was never the best-funded or the best-connected company in its market. It was the one that understood what a person would actually do with a small screen.

The Pilot

The Pilot 1000 and 5000 were introduced in March 1996. The base model sold for $299; the Pilot 5000 had several times the memory and sold for $369. The second generation, the PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional, launched on 10 March 1997 at $299 and $399 [2][6].

Graffiti was the product's identity. Users wrote letters in a simplified single-stroke alphabet — no crossing of the letters A or F, for example — and the device converted them to text. It was faster than the character recognition that had failed on earlier devices, and it required users to learn something, which turned out to be a feature rather than a bug [6].

The PalmPilot had reportedly sold more than a million units by 1998 [2]. Two legal disputes shadowed the name: the Pilot pen company sued over the trademark, and Xerox sued over the Unistroke patents that sat behind Graffiti, obtaining a $22.5 million retrospective licensing payment from Palm [1][2].

Three owners before independence

U.S. Robotics bought Palm in September 1995. The price is reported inconsistently — $44 million in one company history, and a Chicago Tribune headline of 6 September 1995 describes a $47 million stock deal — and the sources consulted do not settle it [6].

In June 1997 U.S. Robotics was itself acquired by 3Com, and Palm became a 3Com subsidiary [1]. The founders left in June 1998, frustrated with the direction 3Com was taking, and founded Handspring [4].

Then came the moment people remember. On 1 March 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, 3Com made Palm an independent public company. The offering priced 23 million shares at $38 each, valuing Palm at about $21 billion, with 3Com retaining most of the stock; the shares reached $95.06 on the first day of trading [1][7].

The bubble had one year left in it. Palm shares lost 90 per cent of their value in just over a year, and by June 2001 they were trading at $6.50 — at that point the worst performer among PDA makers on the NASDAQ [1].

Splitting into two companies and putting them back together

Palm's response to a shrinking market was to become two companies.

In January 2002 it set up a subsidiary to develop and license the Palm OS; the subsidiary was named PalmSource in February and then spun off as an independent company [1]. In October 2003 the hardware division merged with Handspring and was renamed palmOne [1].

The Handspring merger was agreed in June 2003 and completed on 29 October 2003. Handspring shareholders received 0.09 Palm shares for each Handspring share — about 13.9 million shares in total — giving them 32.2 per cent of the combined company, and the swap was valued at about $169 million [9]. Handspring had been founded in 1998 by Hawkins, Dubinsky and Colligan after they left Palm, and its Visor line used a USB connection that was faster than Palm's serial synchronisation [4].

The last hundred million dollars of that arrangement also went to separating the name. palmOne and PalmSource set up a holding company that owned the Palm trademark, and in May 2005 palmOne bought PalmSource's share of it for $30 million. In July 2005 palmOne reverted to the name Palm, Inc. and the ticker PALM [1].

PalmSource was sold to ACCESS for $324 million in late 2005 [1]. In December 2006 Palm paid ACCESS $44 million for an irrevocable licence to use and modify the Palm OS Garnet source code and ship it without royalties, which let it develop hardware and software together again [1]. In June 2007 the private-equity firm Elevation Partners bought 25 per cent of Palm for $325 million, after what chief executive Ed Colligan described as approaches from larger parties over the previous six months [1].

The company had one product cycle left. On 18 December 2008 Colligan announced that Palm would no longer develop new handheld PDAs. On 8 January 2009 it announced webOS and the Palm Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show, and the phone reached the market on 6 June 2009, initially only on Sprint [1].

The reviews were good and the launch was too small. Sprint was a distant third among American carriers; the company entered 2009 with about $250 million in cash and short-term investments; and although webOS hype lifted the stock from around $3 to about $18, by 2010 the shares were below $4 [1].

HP buys it, then stops

On 28 April 2010 Hewlett-Packard announced it would acquire Palm at $5.70 a share — $1.2 billion in cash, or roughly $1.4 billion counting warrants, convertible and preferred shares, and about a 23 per cent premium to the previous close [8]. The acquisition completed on 1 July 2010 [1].

HP's ownership lasted thirteen months. In August 2011 the company announced it was ending production and support of Palm and webOS devices, and the TouchPad tablet launched that July was discontinued within weeks and cleared out in a fire sale [1][10]. Wikipedia's account sums it up plainly: the decision marked the end of the Palm brand after 19 years [1].

One conflict worth flagging. The size of the HP–Palm deal is quoted as $1.2 billion, as $1.4 billion including warrants and preferences, and occasionally as $1.8 billion. The $1.2 billion figure is the announced price; the larger numbers come from different ways of counting, or in the last case from later press coverage that may include HP's subsequent write-offs [8][12].

Where webOS went

webOS is the part of Palm that is still running.

HP did not kill it outright. It announced in December 2011 that it would open-source the software, and Open webOS 1.0, an OpenEmbedded-based build, was released on 28 September 2012 [5].

On 25 February 2013 HP announced it was selling webOS to LG Electronics, to be used on its web-enabled smart televisions in place of LG's existing NetCast platform. The financial terms were not disclosed. LG acquired the documentation, source code, developer team and related websites; HP kept the Palm patents and the App Catalog cloud services [5][11][12].

LG put webOS on its first webOS televisions in January 2014 and has kept it since, extending it to smart refrigerators and projectors. In January 2014 HP also sold the webOS and Palm patents to Qualcomm, from which LG licenses them for its devices [5].

By 2025 LG was still developing the platform publicly: its webOS Hub 3.0 release, announced on 13 June 2025, is the version licensed to third-party television brands, and LG said more than 600 brands had joined the ecosystem over the previous five years [13].

Where the name went

The trademark took a different route from the software.

In October 2014 HP sold the Palm trademark to a shelf corporation tied to the Chinese electronics firm TCL Corporation [1]. Four years later, in October 2018, a small Palm-branded Android phone — model PVG100 — went on sale in the United States, initially only on Verizon and usable only when paired with another phone on the network, and later sold unlocked. It was developed by Palm Ventures Group, a San Francisco startup, backed by TCL, and manufactured by Tinno Mobile. It was the first Palm-branded device on the market since the Palm Pre 2 in 2010 [3].

The brand's current position is modest but real: palm.com is live and markets a small Android phone as a device for people who want less phone. What is not verifiable is whether TCL still owns the trademark in 2026, where Palm Ventures Group stands now, or whether anything beyond that one handset is being planned [3][14].

Reading the ending

Palm is the clearest case in this registry of a company that was right about the future and late to it.

It was right that people would carry a computer. The Pilot proved it in 1996, a full decade before the iPhone. It was right that the phone would absorb the PDA — the Treo, which Palm developed with Handspring and shipped through the 2000s, was one of the first successful smartphones [1].

Where it went wrong was timing and scale. It split into two companies just as the market was consolidating, sold the software half, bought the hardware half, and then arrived at the smartphone platform transition with one carrier, one device and about $250 million of runway [1]. By the time webOS was good, Palm could not afford to wait for it to sell.

The residue is undignified in a way that is typical of consumer hardware: a phone brand now used on a deliberately tiny handset, and a well-regarded operating system doing honest work on televisions. Both are real. Neither is Palm.

The U.S. Robotics side of the same corporate chain — the modem business that bought Palm in 1995 and was itself swallowed by 3Com — is covered in its own entry in this registry.

Entries in this story

Sources

  1. Palm, Inc. — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  2. PalmPilot — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  3. Palm (companion) — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  4. Handspring, Inc. — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  5. webOS — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  6. Palm, Inc. company history profile — Reference for Business (The Gale Group) (2026-09-20) ↩
  7. 3Com's Shares Surge in Anticipation of Offering — The New York Times (2026-09-20) ↩
  8. Hewlett-Packard to Buy Palm — The New York Times DealBook (2026-09-20) ↩
  9. Merger to unite siblings Palm, Handspring — Deseret News (2026-09-20) ↩
  10. HP murders webOS tablets, phones — The Register (2026-09-20) ↩
  11. HP offloads Palm WebOS assets to Korea's LG — BBC News (2026-09-20) ↩
  12. HP finally parts with webOS in LG deal — USA TODAY (2026-09-20) ↩
  13. LG Launches Upgraded webOS Hub With Advanced AI Solutions for Third-Party Brands — LG (2026-09-20) ↩
  14. Palm home page — Palm (2026-09-20) ↩