In 1992, Jeff Hawking founded Palm. Palm's first PDA was the Zoomer in 1993, Palm then began making Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs. In 2008, Palm announced their own WebOS operating system for their smartphones. In 2010, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion and still releases smartphones and now tablets running WebOS. Read on for the latest Palm news, reviews and videos:
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by Adam Doud | April 1, 2013 10:41 AMRead OnIn a surprise announcement today, HP CEO Meg Whitman has revealed that HP has purchased webOS back from LG. “HP is definitely maybe committed to probably doubling down on webOS in the coming weeks this time. Stay tuned.” The deal was consummated last night for $600 million and HP has to fill LG's soda machine for three years. “It's like getting it at a discount. 50% off the last time we bought it. It's a real coup,” Whitman added.] Nary a cocktail napkin was safe in Sunnyvale as the design team kicked into high gear. HP anticipates their new flagship phone, the Pre 4-1, will be ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 28, 2013 1:40 PMRead OnWe love us some new technology, and we certainly give it its fair shake on today's episode of the Pocketnow Weekly. But every so often, you need to give a little lip-service to the tech of days gone by. The platforms and devices of yesteryear. That's right: I'm talking about dead technology. It makes sense, then, that a man going by the twitter handle DeadTechnology is here to help us dust off those fond memories. In his inaugural visit to the Pocketnow Weekly, our own Adam Doud pulls back the veil of public apathy secrecy surrounding the phenomenon of the "webOS meetup," a regular ...
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by Adam Doud | March 5, 2013 7:00 AMRead OnwebOS to me is reminiscent of the Martin Short character in the movie Pure Luck. In that movie, Short plays literally the unluckiest man alive. At one point in the movie, Short is asked to take a seat at a table with dozens of chairs. One of the chairs has been rigged to collapse, and Short is asked to pick any of the dozens of chairs in the room. He naturally picks the broken chair. webOS, from the very infancy of its life, always, ALWAYS, picked the broken chair. Seriously. Let's run this down, all chronological like. When it All Began First, before it even existed, webOS caused ...
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by Michael Fisher | February 13, 2013 7:29 AMRead OnAfter almost a solid year of keeping its customers waiting, it looks like Samsung is finally gearing up for a North American release of the wireless charging product it promised way back at the Galaxy S III announcement. That's a good thing, and we're eagerly awaiting some hands-on time with the official inductive-charging pad ... but we're not exactly the patient sort. Fortunately, the popularity of the Galaxy S III, combined with an abundance of old Palm charging accessories, means a wide array of mods are available that allow users to bring inductive charging to their Samsung ...
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by Michael Fisher | December 20, 2012 2:30 PMRead OnOn the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse, three men gather to talk strategy, survival ... and smartphones. This week on the Pocketnow Weekly, we discuss what device we'd like at our side for the end of the world, before going for a quick dip in the nostalgia pool with a chat about running new Android software on old devices. After that, we knock around some Samsung Galaxy-family speculation, then dive headlong into a rundown of the merits and drawbacks of the new Samsung ATIV S, before touching on the tablet-smartphone interaction issue. Finally, we wrap it all up with some tablet speculation ...
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by Michael Fisher | October 2, 2012 3:39 PMRead OnHP did something pretty cool the other day: it delivered on a promise it made to webOS customers. I already mentioned, in yesterday's article about HP's Windows Phone destiny, why that alone is a newsworthy event. From casual customers to the top champions of the platform, webOS users were given one of the biggest raw deals in tech history when HP terminated all webOS development little more than a month after the release of its flagship product, in the midst of one of the strangest corporate shake-ups ever. HP still hasn't fully recovered from the accompanying (aborted) attempt to ...
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by Michael Fisher | August 2, 2012 3:39 PMRead OnAround these parts, we're no strangers to wireless charging. We've been talking about inductive recharging for a while now, and with a webOS expat like me onboard, that's no surprise. Palm pioneered wireless replenishment as an out-of-the-box feature in its Palm Pre Plus and subsequent devices, and even though it's been nearly three years since, other manufacturers have been slow to incorporate similar technology into their products. Even though standards like Qi, sprung from the loins of the Wireless Power Consortium, have picked up steam since, we still haven't seen huge adoption of ...
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by Michael Fisher | July 20, 2012 10:51 AMRead OnFrom ultramodern trailblazer in the late '90s, to common communicator in the mid-'00s, to symbol of the marginalized "dumbphone" today, flip and clamshell phones have undergone quite the status shift over the last two decades. I've talked before about how awesome the flip form factor was and how much I miss it, and it turns out I'm not alone. Lots of commenters showed up at the end of that piece to share their fondness for the clamshell phones of old, and recently editor-in-chief Brandon Miniman suggested we take a quick look at some of the most well-known, and some of the more obscure, ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 23, 2012 5:08 PMRead OnWe've recently run a series of articles discussing the awesome features of certain mobile platforms, and how those highlights drive users to love them. We've covered Windows Phone, iOS, and Android, the platforms with the best combination of mindshare and potential, and today I thought I'd give a shoutout to a lesser-known (but immensely influential) player in the mobile space: webOS. If the details are hazy with the passage of time, here's a brief refresher. webOS was Palm's replacement for its legacy PalmOS, the platform that helped launch the smartphone and PDA revolution via the Palm ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 22, 2012 3:42 PMRead OnThose of you who've followed my writing for a while know that I'm a refugee from the Great webOS Collapse of 2011, and there's still a lot I miss and love about the platform. While I try to write about it as often as I can, the sad truth is there's not a lot of news about the "little OS that couldn't" these days - things are pretty quiet as it marches toward open source. So I'm kind of waiting along with everyone else for that to wrap up this fall. Until then, though, I'm still using webOS somewhat often via my HP TouchPad. Sometimes I even pull the tiny HP Veer out of storage and relive ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 10, 2012 11:47 AMRead OnBefore the release of Apple's newest tablet, when we were all still calling it the "iPad 3," there was the usual tempest of rumor and speculation regarding the new device. Some of this scuttlebutt, like the Retina display, proved to be true. Other unverified claims, like quad-core processors and an 8MP camera, didn't. My favorite rumor at the time, because I didn't care much about either tablet cameras or CPU core count, was that Apple would be eliminating the home button on its new iPad, leaving a clean uninterrupted bezel all the way around the screen. It wasn't the first time we'd heard ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 10, 2012 9:02 AMRead OnDevotees of the webOS ecosystem learned long ago not to underestimate the power of a motivated homebrew community. It was grassroots efforts like webOS-Internals that unlocked the potential of the platform and earned the respect and endorsement of Palm, and later HP. It should come as no surprise, then, that a group of similarly talented but differently motivated developers have come together for the common goal of altering yet another webOS device: the diminutive HP Veer. This time, though, their goal isn't to modify webOS, but to replace it- with Android. Fortunately, some of these sharp ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 23, 2012 12:53 PMRead OnI'd like 2012 to know something: I'm fine without Back to the Future's hover-skateboard, or the Jetsons' flying car. I can even survive with the knowledge that the "Human Bird Wings" video is a fake. As I may have mentioned before, I grew up watching Star Trek. The moment I was able to start carrying a communicator and a tricorder wherever I went, "the future" became "the present," and my life was basically complete. Aim high, kids. What I can not brook, however, is the tech world's continued insistence that wires play a part in our wireless world. As personal media players, smartphones, ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 11, 2012 3:51 AMRead OnWhen HP dumped the TouchPad in spectacular fashion with a bargain-basement firesale last fall, hobbyists flocked to eBay, Amazon, and Best Buy to snag their piece of heavily-discounted tablet hardware. Some of these buyers were just looking for a cheap tablet; others were webOS fans hoping to stock up on some long-term backups for their favorite platform; and still others had a different dream. They wanted a cheap but well-specced tablet on which to run Android. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of the CyanogenMod Team, that dream has finally been willed into reality. And while there are a ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | January 28, 2012 8:59 AMRead OnJon Rubinstein left Apple to take over Palm and after HP's acquisition of the company he was on board with Hewlett-Packard. He left the company after completing his commitment to stay 12-to 24-months. "Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well", said HP's Mylene Mangalindan. "I am going to take a well-deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS", Rubinstein said. He worked hard on the iPod team over at Apple until he joined Roger McNamee in 2006 as the two created Elevation Partners. Jon Rubinstein became CEO of Palm in 2009 replacing Ed Colligan, where he ...