Palm Brand Sold Off By HP – New Smartphones on the Way?

Go to Palm.com right now and you’ll see the message above. After that address stopped directing people to hpwebos.com it started going to mynewpalm.com suggesting that something interesting was happening behind the scenes.

It was later discovered that HP had sold off the Palm trademarks to a company called Wide Progress Global Limited – a company supposedly linked to Alcatel One Touch, which is in turn owned by Chinese smartphone company  TCL Corporation. As ArsTechnica says, this move could be seen as TCL’s attempt to break into the US smartphone market under a well-known brand. This all leads people to believe that we’ll see a Palm comeback in some form or another.

Palm is famous for dominating the PDA market that pre-dated smartphones, with its popular Palm Pilot. However, with the advent of smartphones, Palm’s PDA business faltered and they ended up falling behind the new surprise market leaders (Apple and Google). Palm was in turn bought by HP and with the use of the WebOS, they tried to rejuvenate a once leading brand.

As we all know now, that failed, and it’ll be interesting to see what is made of this attempt by a different company.

Source: ArsTechnica