What Happened to Palm?

Palm helped define mobile computing long before modern smartphones. Founded in 1992, the company popularized handheld personal digital assistants with the PalmPilot—compact organizers that synced contacts, calendars, and notes via the iconic HotSync cradle. Palm’s design emphasized instant-on speed, long battery life, and a simple Graffiti input system, winning mainstream adoption with developers creating thousands of small, useful apps.

As phones gained data capabilities, Palm’s ecosystem evolved. Spun out, merged, and recombined through the late 1990s and early 2000s (including Handspring’s Treo smartphone line), Palm straddled two eras: PDA-first and phone-first. By mid-2000s it faced tougher competition from BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile—soon followed by iPhone and Android. In 2009, Palm attempted a platform reboot with webOS and the Palm Pre, introducing elegant multitasking “cards,” Synergy account aggregation, and a gesture-driven UI that influenced later mobile UX patterns.

Despite critical praise, Palm struggled to scale devices, developer momentum, and carrier distribution. HP acquired Palm in 2010 to make webOS its broader software platform, but hardware efforts were halted in 2011, ending Palm-branded devices. Palm’s legacy endures in mobile UX conventions, the PDA-to-smartphone transition, and the idea that a pocketable computer should be fast, focused, and friendly.