Palm

The company behind the famous Palm Pilot, Palm was founded by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan in 1992. US Robotics acquired Palm in 1995, which was eventually acquired by 3Com in 1997.

On March 1, 2000, 3Com made Palm as an independent publicly traded company. Despite being famous of handheld PDA innovations, Palm has announced that it will stop making PDAs and focus on the smartphone market. PalmInfocenter.com: Colligan: No New Palm Handhelds Palm Pre is the first groundbreaking product after several years of hiatus.

On June 17, 2010, PreCentral.net reported that Palm is going to run a promo on 50% discount to all Palm apps. Despite this promo, the developers are still getting their full entitlement. [1]

It was announced on April 28, 2010, after major equity markets in the U.S. had closed, that Palm was purchased by Hewlett-Packard for a reported $5.70 per share equal to $1.2 billion USD. The purchase price is 23 percent above were Palm stock had closed at the end of trading.http://www.cnbc.com/id/36832774

Speculation had started as early as April 12, 2010, as to the future of Palm; when Bloomberg reported that the Palm company was likely to be sold. Retaining the services of Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst Partners, Palm had begun a process to seek suitors for its acquisition. Lenovo and HTC had been rumored to be reviewing Palm. Interestingly, HTC had previously built the popular Treo Pro smartphone for Palm.http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/7868/treo-pro-manufactured-by-htc/

With increased competition from Apple, Google, Microsoft as well as a myriad of smaller OEM smartphone and PDA manufacturers, Palm's market share and stock price had steadily decreased over the past several months. Being one of the oldest brands in smartphone and PDA technology, Palm maintains a powerful brand presence and has a significant amount of proprietary technology.http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=arvXvuu.DqW4&pos=3

This strong branding presence with smartphones and its Palm OS are already being capitalized by HP. In the same press release announcing the acquisition of Palm, HP also announced that all future smartphone releases, which had previously been done under the IPAQ brand and utilizing the Windows Mobile OS, will now utilize the Palm OS.http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100428xa.html

The Palm product line started with the Palm Pilot 1000 and Palm Pilot 5000 which were introduced in March 1996. The Pilot utilizes a Motorola processor running at 16 MHz with 128 KB memory. [1]

In 1997, Palm was acquired by 3Com.[2] After being acquired, the founders of Palm were not happy with the company’s direction and left to establish Handspring in June 1998. [3]

The first Handspring PDA is the Handspring Visor Solo which offered expansion slot that the original Palm lack.[4] The phone component was incorporated to the product line with the introduction of the Treo 180 (with phone in flip form factor) in 2002.[5] Handspring merged with Palm in 2003 to form a company called PalmOne.[6].

As a result of purchase, including the Palm trademark in April 2005, the company reverted its name back to Palm Inc. with the ticker symbol PALM on the NASDAQ. [7]

On December 17, 2009, Palm reported that total revenues for second quarter of fiscal year 2010 were $78.1 million with the gross profit margin being $5.5 million. [8]

The Palm Pre was debuted in January 2009 at the CES 2009 convention. The device supports EVDO rev.A, WiFi and bluetooth. It also features a removeable battery, micro USB and USB mass storage support. In addition it also has an area on screen for navigation and a 3.5mm headphone jack.Gizmodo: Live: Palm Keynote (January 8, 2009)

• 1992: Jeff Hawkins founds Palm Computing, Inc. and, with help from Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, invents their first PDA, the Palm Pilot

• 1995: Acquired by U.S. Robotics Corp.

• 1997: U.S. Robotics Corp. acquired by 3Com, making Palm, Inc. a subsidiary

• June, 1998: Original creators become unhappy with 3Com's business direction and leave to form Handspring

• March 1, 2000: 3Com files and IPO for Palm, Inc., and stock prices hit the company record, $95.60, on its first day of trading

• June, 2001: Stock prices reach $6.50 per share

• January, 2002: Develops wholly-owned subsidiary company, PalmSource, to develop and license Palm OS

• August 2003: Hardware division merges with Handspring and renamed to palmOne, Inc.

• April 2005: palmOne purchases PalmSource's share of the Palm trademark for $30 million

• July 2005: palmOne reverts back to Palm, Inc.

• January 2009: Palm introduces new smartphone, Palm Pre, at Consumer Electronics Show

• June 2009: Jon Rubinstein promoted to Palm CEO replacing Ed Colligan.

• September 9, 2009: Palm introduces Palm Pixi.

• January 7, 2010: Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus were introduced.

• April 12, 2010: Palm placed for immediate sale by management.

• '"April 23, 2010:" Senior VP of software and services, Michael Abbott resigned from Palm.

[1]

• "May 27, 2010:" Palm WebOS designer Matias Duarte left Palm for Google

[2]