Palm Attempts to Clime Back From the Brink

Founded in 1992, Palm Computing is responsible for Smartphones such as the Centro, Treo and Pre as well as personal digital assistant devices such as the Palm Pilot, Palm III, V & VII, Zire and Tungsten. While Palm had its own operating system, some versions of the Treo ran Windows Mobile.

Palm’s success has been hampered by two significant events. During the dot com bubble and after its acquisition by 3Com in 2000, Palm was traded publicly on the NASDAQ. On its opening day of trading, Palm’s stock reached its all time high of 95.06 US$ per share. When the tech bubble burst, so did Palm’s stock value plummeting all the way down to 6.50 US$ per share, a loss of 90% of its value.

The second significant event to Palm’s downfall was the growing popularity of the Smartphone and the BlackBerry. While Palm did make Smartphones, they were no match for what Research In Motion and other companies were developing at the time.

When all seemed lost, Palm took one final leap of faith. In early 2009, they announced a new operating system, webOS, which would replace the original Palm OS used on all their other mobile devices. On June 6, 2009, Palm released the Pre, a multitouch Smartphone to many positive reviews. Five months later, Palm released a second version of the Pre called the Pixi. Running webOS as well, it was dubbed the little brother by some, but reviews were still positive.

For Palm’s sake, they can keep the idea of webOS fresh in people’s minds. They don’t want to overload the market either. The best thing to do is keep working on developing better and better devices and wait for the right time to put them out. A poorly designed device will without a doubt kill Palm Inc.