When was palm pilot introduced

Palm Centro After ceding a lot of ground in the consumer arena, the low-cost Centro , which debuted in late , was an attempt to take the aging Treo concept and give it more mass-market appeal. The device, which was sort of like a netbook, relied on a Treo for its processing power and connectivity but was scrapped by Palm and never reached the market.

The Pre featured a touch screen and keyboard as well as the kind of multi-touch gestures made popular by the iPhone. More Galleries The best Nintendo Switch games to play in More Galleries 55 weird objects seen on Mars, explained 57 Photos.

Ford Bronco Raptor prototype hits the dirt. Ford F Eluminator shows off Blue Oval's new electric crate motor. The smartphone era is well underway, and Palm is a leader. The Treo may be the hottest model of the moment, boosted by its impressively expansive software library: 20,plus apps that let users do everything from crunch spreadsheets to zap aliens. Palm kills the Foleo without ever having shipped it. Though it insists it will someday be back with a Foleo II , that never appears either.

Also in , Palm hires former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein—one of the masterminds of the iPod—as its executive chairman. He replaces Colligan as CEO two years later. The software is gorgeous and innovative. The Pre, however, has a form factor—small screen, slide-out keyboard—which feels out of date from the moment it ships.

Initially available only on Sprint, the phone never threatens the iPhone and Android. The computing giant says it plans to launch phones, tablets, PCs, and other products built around WebOS. Under the HP name, that is—it retires the Palm brand. But seven weeks later, it shutters the WebOS business. Events Innovation Festival. It even had a switch to change the view from portrait to landscape mode. The trouble was that, at the time, all of that made it a very large, very expensive device. Production was ended less than 2 years into the cycle, not long before others got the same but more refined idea.

The other product just a fraction ahead of its time was the Palm Foleo - the company's one and only foray into the laptop world. It was announced at the end of May as a Naturally, it was both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connected but, most interestingly of all, claimed to have an instant-on feature which brought up the apps and desktop in exactly the same state as you left them when it booted up.

Its major downfall was that it only supported the Treo, but that didn't matter anyway as it never came to market.

It was dropped by the end of September that year. Lucky old Asus. It was designed as a condensed version of the Treo for mass market appeal, much as the Pearl works for BlackBerry.

It has a 1. The phone was a storming success for Palm and accounted for the lion's share of the company's mobile internet traffic, as well as that for the US in general when it first came out. It's since given way as new smartphones have arrived but continued to impress even in So, finally here we are today with the Palm Pre.

It's seemed like donkey's years since CES with those in the US waving the things at us from across the Pond, but the wait is finally over. There was a large, collective sigh of disappointment as O2 was unveiled as the exclusive carrier for the device and its inevitable iPhone-matching price point, but nonetheless it's still a very exciting prospect.

The multi-touch and gesture controlled webOS has taken over from the old software, there's still a full QWERTY plus GPS, a decent looking camera, plenty of storage and even iTunes synching too - no matter how much Apple is trying to shake it off. Perhaps the one draw back are the apps, or serious lack of them, but of the 18 or so from release, one is a Classic Palm OS emulator, so, if you want, you can run thousands of old school pieces of software dating right back to the 90s.

Not a massive plus but certainly a little nostalgia for the enthusiasts. But the story doesn't end there. Soon from the Palm stables will be the light version of the Pre known as the Palm Pixi. It was announced in September and should be out before the end of the year.