Palm OS

History [edit]

Graffiti and one button press

Jeff Hawkins designed Palm OS around a discipline nobody had asked for: everything the device does should be reachable in one or two taps, and it should respond instantly. The Pilot 1000 and 5000 shipped in March 1996 with four applications, Address, Date Book, Memo Pad and To Do List, a stylus, and Graffiti, the shorthand alphabet users learned so the machine would not have to learn handwriting.

It worked because of what it refused to do. One application ran at a time. There was no file system to browse. Synchronising with the PC was one button, HotSync, and it worked. Against Microsoft's Windows CE devices, which tried to shrink a desktop into a handheld, the PalmPilot felt effortless, and Palm OS took the overwhelming share of the PDA market: Palm V, Handspring Visor, Sony CLIE, the Kyocera and Treo smartphones later on.

Splits and spin-offs

The corporate history was messier than the product. Palm was bought by US Robotics, then 3Com; Hawkins left to found Handspring, which built Palm OS devices that outclassed Palm's own, then merged back. In 2003 the operating system was spun off into a separate company, PalmSource, which the Japanese firm ACCESS bought in 2005. Palm the hardware company ended up licensing back, and eventually buying rights to, the system it had created, which by then had been renamed Garnet OS.

Through all of it the OS itself barely moved. Palm OS 5 arrived in 2002; the long-promised modern successor, Cobalt, was finished but never shipped on a single device, because no manufacturer wanted it.

Retired by its own maker

The iPhone made the old discipline look like the limitation it had become. Palm's answer, webOS, was announced at CES in January 2009 and shared nothing with Palm OS but the logo. On 11 February 2009 chief executive Ed Colligan confirmed the other half of that decision: no more Palm OS products, ever. The Centro, a $99 smartphone from 2007, was the last of a line that began with the Pilot.

The ideas outlived the code. Instant-on, sync as a first-class feature, an interface built for fingers-on-glass economy rather than desktop metaphors: every phone works that way now.

The domain today

palm.com now belongs to an unrelated venture selling a credit-card-sized "Palm phone" under licence. The company that built Palm OS is long gone; its hardware sibling died inside HP after the webOS years, a story told in the HP TouchPad entry here.