Palm (PDA)

Palm handhelds were Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) that ran the Palm OS.

On 28 April 2010 it was announced that Hewlett-Packard would acquire Palm for around US$1.2 billion. Although HP kept the Palm brand initially, all new PDA devices announced at press announcement on February 9, 2011, were branded as HP devices, not as Palm devices. TCL Corporation announced in January 2015 that it had acquired Palm's intellectual property from HP at the end of 2014, announcing plans to restart the company with crowdfunding being a key element in the development of new Palm smartphones.

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).

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