Definition: Palm Incorporated

The Sunnyvale, California company that popularized the personal digital assistant (PDA), the pen interface and handwriting recognition, the latter licensed by Apple for its Newton organizer. Founded in 1992 and acquired by HP in 2010, Palm's Zoomer PDA was unsuccessfully marketed by Tandy. However, after U.S. Robotics acquired the company in 1995, more than 350,000 PalmPilots were sold the following year. Although the Pilot moniker was later dropped, people referred to Palm PDAs and even non-Palm PDAs as PalmPilots. See PDA.

In 1998, the Palm creators left U.S. Robotics, which by then had merged into 3Com, and founded Handspring. Handspring licensed the Palm OS and introduced the Visor, the first Palm PDA clone. See Visor.

In 2000, Palm was spun off as a separate company, and in 2002 was divided into palmOne for hardware and PalmSource for software. Later renamed Palm, Inc., palmOne produced PDAs and smartphones. In 2003, Palm acquired the Treo brand from Handspring, which was designed to combine PDA and cellphone, and the Palm product line eventually evolved into smartphones only, including the Pre, Treo and Centro models.

PalmSource licensed the Palm OS and HotSync technology that synchronized data with PCs. Running on a variety of CPUs, the Palm OS was used in more than 40 million handhelds worldwide. In 2005, PalmSource became a subsidiary of Japan-based ACCESS, which licensed the source code back to Palm, Inc. See webOS, PDA and Palm Pre.

The PalmPilot

The PalmPilot popularized the personal digital assistant (PDA), which became ubiquitous but eventually wound up as an application in a smartphone. The rectangle at the bottom is for hand printing. (Image courtesy of palmOne, Inc.)