Palm (PDA)
[7] 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.
This was done with the purchase of an upgrade module sold by Palm, and the replacement of some internal hardware components.
The latter allowed the user to upgrade Palm OS, or, with some external applications, to store programs or data in flash memory.
Handspring went on to produce the Handspring Visor, a clone of the Palm handhelds that included a hardware expansion slot (early Palm devices also had a hardware expansion slot, however this was for device upgrade purposes, not peripherals) and used slightly modified software.
Starting with the Palm Tungsten, the platform transitioned to the ARM architecture with Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Intel as suppliers.
As ARM had previously been used in the Apple Newton series, the platform had significant investment in mobile and low-power applications.
By 2000, Palm had some 74 percent market share,[14] however it was now losing relevance following the launch of Microsoft's Pocket PC platform.
[15] In 2001 it was losing ground to Pocket PCs such as Compaq's iPAQ (which all ran on ARM processors) but also to Handspring devices.
[19] Palm handhelds continued to advance, including the ability to access computer hard drives via USB cables, and began to merge with smartphones.
The "Treo 700w" was one of the later offerings that combined a Palm handheld with mobile phone, e-mail, MMS, and instant messaging (SMS) technology.
It was also the first Palm-branded device to use Microsoft software (Windows Mobile) instead of its own Palm OS.
Multifunction handhelds generally include a wider range of abilities traditionally found in separate devices, for example: an MP3 player, mobile phone, camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In order to try to change this trend, Palm had been working on a new web-based operating system (webOS), which was an embedded Linux operating system that hosts a custom user interface built on standard web browser technology and offered genuine multi-tasking capabilities through a card based concept where each application ran as a card and the use of gestures to navigate between cards and perform actions.
[20] Palm released improved versions of both the Pre and Pixi as the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, which contained improved memory capacity or processor updates but did not significantly address some of the limitations of the hardware (e.g. the screen, and CPU) in comparison to other smartphones on the market at the time.
All new Palm-branded products are designed by a San Francisco startup company backed by its spokesman, TCL and NBA star Stephen Curry.
