Palm (PDA)
line of personal digital assistants and mobile phones
Palm is a 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.
History
Initial development
Pilot was the name of the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (by then a division of USRobotics).
“Palm (PDA)” enters the record as line of personal digital assistants and mobile phones. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Palm, line and personal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1078850. The Library of Congress control number is sh2003001183. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1000, 1996, 2009 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Palm (PDA)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.