Palm Phones
Palm phones is a smartphone manufacturer based in California. Palm phones was created by Jeff Hawkins in 1992 with help from Ed Colligan and Donna Dubinsky. In 1993 they created the Zoomer, this was a PDA for the consumer, with Tandy manufacturing the devise and Casio being the distributor but unfortunately this didn’t take off commercially so they had sell it through synchronisation software to Apple Newton and HP. In 1995 Palm became a subsidiary for 3Com trading under Palm. With the dot com bubble just about to happen Palm phones shares hit a whopping $95.06 USD but due to the dot com bubble bursting and large competition Palm phones lost its value by 90% with shares at just $6.50 USD in June 2001, due to this decrease in value it was named the lowest achieving PDA manufacturer at the time.
Hoping their luck would change in Jan 2002 Palm phones set up a subsidiary to license and develop Palm OS naming it PalmSource making it an independent company. Palm phones merged with Headspring in August 2003 and was renamed to palmOne with the Palm trademark held by a holding company. PalmOne paid $30 million USD for the Palm shares from PalmSource and in 2005 they launched a new brand and name changing the company back to Palm inc.
In January 2006 Palm phones released the Palm Treo 700w, the Treo is powered Microsoft Windows 5 operating system and came with features that include 2.5 inch TFT display, Bluetooth, Microsoft Office, internet explorer, MSN messenger, camera, games, handwriting recognition and ActiveSync 4.1. In June 2009 Palm phone released the Palm Pre with their new WebOS operating system, this allowed the consumer to download applications to their Palm phone plus much more. Some other good features on the Palm Pre is a 3 mega-pixel camera with LED flash, 8 gigabytes of memory, QWERTY keyboard, WiFi and 3G HSDPA connectivity, GPS navigation and push email. Unfortunately Palm phones released the Pre at the same time as Apple released the iPhone so it didn’t really take off and do as well as Palm phones had hoped.
In 2009 Palm phones had a revenue of $736 million USD and employed 939 people so things are going pretty well and in July 2010 HP took over Palm phones for a staggering $1.2 billion USD so watch this space we may see some better Palm phones hit the market soon.
