HP Announces Termination of Mobile Division: Palm, Inc. and webOS Are Now Extinct

Many of us early adopters of mobile devices and personal digital assistants [(PDA's) the predecessors to the smartphone] fondly remember our early Palm devices. For many of us, our earliest mobile devices were the Palm Pilot and successors such as the Palm m100. These devices had tiny fractions of the processing power, RAM and memory available on current devices. They had small, grey scale resistive screens that required the use of a small stylus to navigate around screen. And of course, they had neither calling capabilities nor the ability to access the internet. But they were the best available thing on the market at the time, and they were a revolutionary leap forward for compact, mobile computing. Eventually, the PDA would give birth to devices like the iPhone and Android smartphones like the DROID line on Verizon.

While Palm, founded in 1992, was one of the earliest, most innovative companies in the ultra-mobile computing business, it has proved in recent years to be unsustainable in the face of competition from companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, with their mobile operating systems Windows Mobile, iOS and Android.