Palm was one of the pioneers of the smart device industry, their Palm PDA’s and then Treo Smartphones, were innovative and led the way for many into the hand-held computing database. But those days are long in the past, the company fell into financial trouble in 2010 and was eventually sold off to Hewlett Packard (HP), who halted production of Palm devices just over a year later. But some new evidence is pointing towards a return of the Palm brand, and it could be running Android.
After HP purchased Palm, they dispersed a number of components from Palm to other vendors, the latest component to change hands is the Palm brand. ArsTechnica has done some tracking of the change of ownership and it points towards manufacturer Alcatel, being the new owner. Apparently the hpwebos.com site which was the home for the WebOS developments that Palm and HP made before Palm was finally killed off, is now redirecting to a new URL: mynewpalm.com. There’s not much there, just a Palm logo with ‘Coming Soon’ and ‘Smart Move’ alternating beneath:
While Coming Soon is exciting for Palm fans, it’s the ‘Smart Move’ logo, which is also the slogan for the Alcatel One Touch line of phones which is part of the trail which leads to the Alcatel link. Alcatel President Americas and Pacific Nicolas Zibell, is also the signatory on the paper work for Wide Press Global Limited, which according to paperwork found, has been the recipient of a change in trademark ownership for the Palm brand.
Palm as a brand brought about many exciting and innovative ideas for mobile and handheld computing. Their stagnation in latter years was the impetus for many to leave to Android, iOS and Blackberry, but WebOS had some great ideas, just a little too late. WebOS had such good ideas that Google hired their lead software designer – Matias Duarte – for Android and that decision has gone pretty well.
It’s not likely we’ll see Palm reach the heady heights of development we once saw, but it’ll be nice to be able to purchase a Palm device, with Android already installed without any messing around. We’ll have to wait and see exactly how long ‘Coming Soon’ is, hopefully not too long.