Palm, Inc. is a personal digital assistant and smartphone manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that is responsible for popular products such as the Zire, Tungsten PDAs, Treo smartphones and the LifeDrive. Previous product lines include the Palm Pilot, Palm III, Palm V and Palm VII. While their older devices run Palm OS Garnet, four editions of the Treo run Windows Mobile. In early 2009 Palm announced a new operating system, Palm webOS, which is expected to replace the original Palm OS Garnet.

History

The company was acquired by U.S. Robotics Corp. in 1995. In June 1997, Palm became a subsidiary of 3Com when U.S. Robotics was acquired by 3Com. In June 1998, the founders became unhappy at the direction in which 3Com was taking the company, and they left and founded Handspring.

3Com made the Palm subsidiary an independent, publicly traded company on March 1, 2000, and it traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol PALM. Palm Inc had its IPO during the Dot com bubble and in its first day of trading the shares of the new company hit an all time high of $95.06[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_23/b3735052.htm BW Online | June 4, 2001 | Palm's Market Starts to Melt in Its Hands ]. But competition and the end of the Dot com bubble caused Palm's shares to lose 90% of its value in just over a year. By June 2001 the company's shares were trading at $6.50, making it the worst performing PDA manufacturer on the NASDAQ index at the time.

In August 2003, the hardware division of the company merged with Handspring, was renamed to palmOne, Inc. and traded under the ticker symbol PLMO. The Palm trademark was held by a jointly owned holding company.

In April 2005, palmOne purchased PalmSource's share in the 'Palm' trademark for US$30 million. In July 2005, palmOne launched its new name and brand reverting back to Palm, Inc. and trading under the ticker symbol PALM once again.

In late 2005 ACCESS, which specializes in mobile and embedded web browser technologies, acquired PalmSource for US$324 million.

On January 4, 2006, Palm released the Palm Treo 700w, the first Windows Mobile-powered Treo in a partnership with Verizon Wireless and Microsoft.

In December 2006, Palm, Inc. paid $44 million to ACCESS for the rights to the source code for Palm OS Garnet. With this arrangement, a single company is again developing Palm hardware and software. Palm can modify the licensed software as needed and it need not pay royalties to ACCESS over future years.