Palm (PDA)

Palm is a now discontinued line of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones developed by California-based Palm, Inc., originally called Palm Computing, Inc. Palm devices are often remembered as "the first wildly popular handheld computers," responsible for ushering in the smartphone era.

The first Palm device, the PalmPilot 1000, was released in 1996 and proved to be popular. It led a growing market for portable computing devices where previous attempts such as Apple's Newton failed or others like Hewlett-Packard's 200LX only serving a niche target market.

Most of Palm's PDAs and mobile phones ran the in-house Palm OS software, which was later also licensed to other OEMs. A few devices ran on Microsoft's Windows Mobile. In 2009 Palm OS's successor webOS was released, first shipping with the Palm Pre. In 2011 Hewlett-Packard discontinued the Palm brand and started releasing new devices under the HP brand, but discontinued its hardware later that same year.

In 2018, a start-up backed by TCL Corporation (owner of the Palm brand) released a new device simply called Palm, although in essence it bears no relation to the original Palm devices.

Pilot was the name of the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (by then a division of U.S. Robotics).

The inventors of the Pilot were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, who founded Palm Computing in 1992. The original purpose of this company was to create handwriting recognition software, named PalmPrint, and personal information management (PIM) software, named PalmOrganizer for the PEN/GEOS based Zoomer devices. Their research convinced them, however, they could create better hardware as well. Before starting development of the Pilot, Hawkins said he carried a block of wood, the size of the potential Pilot, in his pocket for a week. Palm was widely perceived to have benefited from the notable, if ill-fated, earlier attempts to create a popular handheld computing platform by Go Corporation, Tandy, and Apple Computer (Newton).

The prototype for the first Palm Connected Organizer was called "Palm Taxi". In 1996 Palm released its first generation PDA, the PalmPilot 1000 and 5000. After the out-of-court settlement in 1998 of a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by the Pilot Pen Corporation, the company no longer used that name, instead referring to its handheld devices as Palm Connected Organizers or more commonly as "Palms".

The first Palms, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, had no infrared port, backlight, or flash memory, but did have a serial communications port. Their RAM size was 128 kB and 512 kB respectively, and they used version 1 of Palm OS. Later, it became possible to upgrade the Pilot 1000 or 5000's internals to up to 1 MB of internal RAM. This was done with the purchase of an upgrade module sold by Palm, and the replacement of some internal hardware components. Originally, it was conceived that all Palm PDAs were to be hardware-upgradable to an extent, but ultimately, this capability gave way to external memory slots and firmware-upgradable flash memory after the Palm III series.