Palm Invented the Smartphone. HP Bought It and Killed It in 13 Months.

Every kind of music has one: the band that invented the sound, then stood at the back of the room while somebody else got famous playing it. In smartphones, that band was Palm. Fifteen years before Hewlett-Packard paid $1.2 billion for the company and killed it in about 13 months, Palm had put a computer in a shirt pocket and shown the world what a smartphone could be. This is the story of the PalmPilot, the wooden block it was carved from, the IPO that briefly made the rest of 3Com worth less than zero, the Treo, webOS, the Palm Pre, and how the software HP couldn't sell now runs on hundreds of millions of TVs made by somebody else. Sources: reporting and retrospectives on Palm, Handspring, PalmSource, palmOne, and HP's 2010-2011 webOS program, including Donna Dubinsky's 2023 oral history for the Computer History Museum, The Verge's "Pre to Postmortem" retrospective, and contemporary coverage of the 2000 Palm IPO, the 2007 iPhone launch, the 2009 Palm Pre launch, the 2011 TouchPad shutdown and fire sale, and the 2013 sale of webOS to LG. Where accounts differ, they are described as accounts.