Palm Pilot

Palm m130

Palm Pilot was the name given to several early models of personal digital assistant manufactured by Palm, Inc. (when it was a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics or 3Com). More recent models of PDA manufactured by Palm are not named Pilots due to name infringement lawsuits brought on by the Pilot Pen Corporation , but "Palm Pilot" has entered the vernacular as a synonym for PDA, regardless of brand.

The original inventors of the Palm Pilot were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan , who founded Palm, Inc.. Before starting development of the Palm, Hawkins is said to have carried a block of wood, the size of the potential pilot, in his pocket for a week.

Because Palm, Inc. was a subsidiary of 3Com, the group of founders became upset that they did not have enough control over the Palm product. As a result, they broke off from Palm and founded Handspring in June 1998. When they left Palm, Hawkins wrote a license for the Palm OS for Handspring, and the company became the first Palm OS licensee. Handspring went on to produce the Handspring Visor, a clone of the Palm Pilot that used a modified version of the Palm OS. Handspring merged back with Palm to form palmOne in 2003.

Palm Pilots initially ran on the popular Dragonball processors, a Motorola 68000 derivate. Newer ones, in common with many other PDAs, run using a variation of the ARM architecture (usually referred to by the Intel Xscale brand name). This is a class of RISC microprocessors that is widely used in mobile devices and embedded systems, and its design was influenced strongly by a popular 1970s/1980s CPU, the MOS Technology 6502.

Palm Pilots are beginning to merge with smartphones. The Treo 650 is the latest offering that combines a Palm Pilot with mobile phone, e-mail, SMS, and instant messaging. It is widely expected that Palm Pilots as a PDA-only device will disappear as multi-function Palm Pilots like the Treo 650 decline in price. Some predict that this will be caused in part by Palmsource convincing cellphone manufacturers to use Palm OS-like interfaces and PIM apps in their phones, bringing about cheaper, but less funcional, Palm OS smartphones.

See also

• Palm OS
• PalmSource, Inc.
• palmOne, Inc.

External links

• Palmone.com