From their founding to their acquisition and discontinuation of their operating system, Palm Inc was a company known and loved by many. The Palm name signified quality and thought process to their loyal consumers. It saddened people when their name got phased out of the production of devices running their software after the acquisition of their company, but now another company wants to being that name back to the people.
For a catch up from the start to the present, Palm Inc was a company who originally helped start PDAs, with the PalmPilot. With the decline of those, they made and used Palm OS to run on their mobile devices at the time. The founders of the company latee on left, formed another company, which had many exchanges with Palm before settling to use the same operating system. Palm made another operating system, webOS, which many admired. It featured touch geustures and features not seen in other operating systems beforehand. Hewlett-Packard (HP) ended up buying the company, and then eventually returing the Palm name, and decided to build onto webOS. The public did not react well to HP webOS, and eventually sold it to LG, who now uses it on their smart TVs. After selling it's patents to Qualcomm, HP in 2015, sold the Palm trademark to a shelf company of TCL.
TCL Communications is a well known Chinese-based company, who made the Alcatel OneTouch devices, lisencing the name from Alcatel-Lucent (now apart of Nokia). Despite buying the Palm name, not much has been done besides redirecting palm.com to MyNewPalm.com. However, late last year, TCL annouced it was now the global lisencee of the BlackBerry devices, and this year making the BlackBerry KEYone. Many marked this as the death of Palm, but new reports state that 2018 will also have Palm-branded devices in store.
As this may excite some fans, others are rather disappointed. Although they have missed the Palm devices on the market, there has been a considerable gap of time between Palm ending, and this announcement. Also, webOS is now owned by LG, and it is highly unlikely newer Palm devices would run the webOS they were known for, but rather Android. Another difference would be the company itself. Unlike the BlackBerry and Nokia comebacks, the possible one from Palm would be a completely different company, with different staff and history.
Reception is mixed, when announcement of TCL's acquisition of the brand, many were excited to see what was next. However, now the public has been waiting for alnost 2 years, now reception is mixed. Some are excited, especially as they are even helping out BlackBerry. Others, including Adam Doud of Android Authority, like that the Palm brand is coming back, but are disappointed it is not the same one everyone enjoyed, even saying the brand is better-left dead. This makes sense as this may ruin the reputation the former compant had if the remake fails.
What are your thoughts of another company trying to bring back the Palm brand in 2018? Do you think it will even happen?
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