Palm is dead. Remember them?

Buh-bye!

Palm devices were the original PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant). Palm was once the company that everyone rushed to copy. Its first successful PDA, in fac t the first successful PDA by any company, was the Pilot - and it was so successful that even years after the Pilot was discontinued, people referred to their current devices as a "Palm Pilot" (usually running on thus: "Palmpilot").

I had two Palm devices, sequentially, to keep track of calendars and contacts. Palm PDAs This was long before someone got smart and decided that combining a PDA with a cell phone might be a winner. Thus was born the smartphone. The first smartphone to be called that was the Ericsson R380, but the first smartphone to be widely available in the US was a Palm-Kyocera phone, the 6035.

Soon, everyone was getting into the act, including Microsoft's OS for smartphones. Handspring then introduced the Palm Treo series of smartphones. I had a couple of these, too, a 655 then a 755, and my daughter was the 755 until a couple of months ago on Verizon.

Alas, the Treo was the last successful Palm phone. Once RIM introduced the Blackberry, Palm's market share began falling and never stopped. When the first Apple iPhone came along, the bell tolled loud and long for Palm's products.

In fact, not ever Hewlett-Packard's acquisition could save Palm, and just yesterday, HP announced that Palm and all its products based on Palm's WebOS are being discontinued. The last smartphone Palm-Hp tried to sell was the Pre. I looked it over very closely before I got my HTC Incredible and I liked it a lot. WebOS really is an amazing OS for portable devices. But there never were many apps, the Pre was just too small and its form factor badly designed to be used by, well, human beings.