What does palm mean?

Pocket PC is the traditional name of popular personal digital assistant (PDA, also known as PDA), which is a hand-held setting form and also a famous PDA. Broadly speaking, Palm is a PDA, which was invented by Palm Company. The operating system on this PDA is also called Palm and sometimes Palm OS. Palm in a narrow sense refers to PDA products produced by Palm Company, which is different from other PDA products running Palm operating system such as Clie of Sony Company and Visor/Treo of Handspring Company. Its data is displayed on the liquid crystal display (LCD). Its remarkable feature is its basic data input method: a writing device called a stylus, which can click the icon on the display screen to select the input items. The stylus can also be used to input information (words and numbers) on the surface of the display screen by handwriting, which is called graffiti. PalmPilot series products were originally developed and designed by a company called "PalmComputing". After two mergers and acquisitions, this company became a business unit of 3Com, and then Palm became a company independently from 3Com.

Palm can be used not only to generate, store and process data, but also to download data from desktop or laptop or from the network, and then transmit new data after processing the data. People can usually do the following things through Palm:

1) Personal information management: phone book, shorthand, important list, password;

2) Reading e-books, including electronic maps and comics;

3) electronic dictionary;

4) Audio-visual, such as mp3；;

5) Send and receive emails online and simply browse;

6) Miscellaneous matters: calendar, remote control of household appliances, public transportation inquiry, mobile phone management, project management, forms, word processing and account management.

[Edit this paragraph ]Palm OS

Palm OS platform is an open software architecture, which consists of hardware reference, Palm OS operating system,

HotSync data synchronization software, SDK tool components and support interface are composed of five parts.

Because it is an open standard, coupled with the success of Palm PDA and Palm's strong support for developers,

Palm OS has a large number of third-party hardware vendors, a surprising number of developers and application software.

Popular point is a platform for you to explore freely.

The main feature of Palm OS operating system is simplicity,

Palm OS uses a simple graphical interface to process information.

Moreover, the operation of Palm OS system occupies less resources and has high processing speed.

Because of the simple internal structure of the system, only a little space is needed for software storage and operation.

However, due to the excessive pursuit of the concept of low power consumption and low hardware requirements in the design of PALM OS,

Therefore, in today's rapid development of the smart phone market, it seems to be out of place.

And at present, the development of its operating platform supporting Chinese is very slow.

It also slowed down its development in the domestic market to a certain extent.

There are not many plam-based mobile phones in China.

Familiar with palm Treo 680, Samsung I539, Lenovo P902, Top G88, etc.

[Edit this paragraph ]Palm development history

PalmComputing Company was founded by JeffHawkins in June 1.992+0.65438 in Silicon Valley, USA, with the goal of successfully designing a lightweight, convenient and humanized notebook computer. PalmComputing has spent some time planning the company's financing and operation strategy, and is also actively looking for partners. 1June, 1992 15, then 35-year-old Donna Doubinsky officially joined the PDA company. Although Donna had limited knowledge of "hand-written portable computers" at first, it can be said that her "curiosity" was far greater than her professional knowledge. However, Donna became Jeff's perfect partner. Jeff got $500,000 from BruceDunlevie, a venture capital company that invested in GeoWorks, $300,000 from Tandy and $500,000 from other venture capital companies before starting the first product plan of PalmComputing.

1993 10, the first product "Zoomer" was launched by the handheld. Unfortunately, this is still a notebook computer that is not light and efficient enough to be sold in the market. To make matters worse, Apple's NewtonPDA was first launched in August of the same year, occupying a leading position in the market. Unfortunately, the two products were not successful, and PDA products launched by HP, GO, Sharp, Toshiba and other manufacturers also failed one after another. Fortunately, PalmComputing still has the remaining funds available, and it has not collapsed, and it can also conduct a review of new faces. So, starting with Zoomer's customers, we began to analyze the really useful functions of PDA products for users. They found that 90% of Zoomer users own a PC, so it is of great significance to transfer files and update application software from the PC. AlmComputing also found that the theme of PDA products should not be to replace the user's desktop PC, but to replace some simple functions of traditional "paper". After rethinking, Jeff found two simple basic principles as the basis for improving the development of Zoomer products. These two principles later became the key to the success of PalmPilot products.

The first principle is to simplify the heavy burden of handwriting recognition system, because Jeff thinks it is feasible to let people learn new brushwork to match the machine. It is impractical and thankless to let machines handle people's complicated handwriting. So Jeff invented the graffiti input method to input English, numbers, symbols and so on. With a new special simple stroke, everyone can input data efficiently and conveniently, thus greatly reducing the computational burden of the recognition system. Even later, it was found that the original graffiti brushwork learning was actually simpler than expected, and many users were also interested in this novel brushwork. The second principle is about scale. How small is it? Jeff boldly decided that if he could put it in his shirt pocket, he would be satisfied. This key restriction has made the simplification goal of new products a perfect success. All functions that can be sacrificed are deleted, and all functions that can become "optional" are not necessary.

Three months after rethinking the market demand, that is,1August 1994, a prototype model was made. Two small No.4 batteries can be started and used for a long time. Built-in "Time Management", "Phone Book", "To-Do Management" and "Notepad" four applications, the price is less than 300 dollars. PalmComputing decided to name this revolutionary new product development project "Landing". 1April, 1996, the task of "touchdown" project was completed, and finally a lightweight portable PDA product with its official name changed to "pilot" was produced. As we all know, this is a very successful product. Within 18 months after listing, it sold10 million units.

For the first time, it surpassed the best-selling records of color TVs and video recorders in the history of electrical appliances. In the past three years, Pilot 1000, Pilot5000, PalmPilotPersonal, PalmPilotProfessional and PalmIII have been launched one after another, and PalmIIIx""PalmV, PalmVII and palmvii were launched in March of 1999. More importantly, the open architecture of the PalmOS program development platform attracts many programmers to develop application software for the PalmOS platform. At present, there are more than 65,438+00,000 kinds of shareware and free software in circulation, and all kinds of excellent application software are still expanding rapidly.

At least10 million users in the world are using PalmPilot. With the launch of PalmIII, PalmIIIx and PalmV, users have also developed from professional users to ordinary users. The proportion of new users discussing using skills in newsgroups has increased dramatically. Although Microsoft developed WindowsCE for PalmPilot and invited many hardware companies to support the production of similar products, Palm still occupies 60% of the PDA market. Palm: a mobile computer that changes the way people live and work. From online trial notepad to TreoTM smart phone, Palm is still committed to the development of mobile computer systems.

10 years ago, Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) successfully captured all professionals with its first online pilot notepad-a super handheld computer with only 16 1g, which integrates calendars, contacts, to-do items and notes. Today, Palm has sold more than 30 million mobile computer products.

At the same time, we take it as our responsibility to continuously improve the public and private lives of people all over the world, and stick to its vision for the future: the future personal computer system must be a mobile computer system.

The first pilot notebook put on the market was worth more than 2,000 yuan ($9). Its unprecedented success is mainly due to the following two points: it can not only be easily synchronized with desktop computers, but also be used in a very simple way-we usually call it the Palm product experience. In addition to adhering to its design philosophy, Palm keeps pace with the times and constantly innovates, adding several new functions to its products, such as e-mail, wireless Internet access and multimedia functions-from video to music. At present, the latest product is TreoTM smart phone, which combines the functional essence of PDA and mobile phone, and provides e-mail service through some telecom operators around the world (1).

In the past ten years, PalmTM products have been sent into space to collect information, and were once active in the Everest expedition, helping the business community successfully complete millions of transactions. Both men, women and children like to use them and have successfully won the hearts of consumers all over the world. From doctors, real estate agents, to students, celebrities, and even CEOs of major enterprises, everyone's life and work are accompanied by Palm products.

Multimedia materials: including voice, photos and Palm chronology. Please visit the voice section of www.palm.com/anniversary., including the voices of Palm founders, industry analysts and employees who have worked in Palm for many years.

Mr. Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, said, "To be honest, even we were a little surprised that the first pilot notepad was so successful. "But when I first talked to jeff hawkins, I was deeply impressed by his statement that the future of personal computer systems-real personal computer systems-will become highly mobile products. That's why we want to design Pilot. This concept is still continuing today. Pilot and subsequent Palm products have become a part of the lives of millions of people-it allows people to keep in touch with their companies and families, send and receive emails and browse the Internet even when they are not at home, and at the same time, it allows them to take their favorite files, music, photos and movies with them. I am deeply proud of our achievements and full of expectations for the future. "

Over the years, loyal customers have purchased more than 30 million Palm products, including 3 million smartphones. The most important of these is individual consumers. With the help of Palm products, their lives have become orderly and they can receive important information at any time. For most individual consumers, Palm V PDA-elegant in appearance and high in efficiency-is the first product that can attract novelty and fashion pursuers, and it has also become the focus of the mainstream market. Other customers from business and service industries, such as doctors, can also use decision support software to improve the quality of their medical services to medical stations and patients.

At present, there are more than 29,000 developers supporting Palm OS(R) platform products. They not only develop innovative consumer and enterprise applications, but also introduce various hardware peripherals, such as keyboards, GPS devices and barcode scanners, which are the most powerful backing of Palm. When Palm includes the Windows Mobile(R) platform and becomes one of the platform choices for its smart phones, it also means that its developer team has grown again.

Help Palm PDA and Treo smartphones to market to retailers, agents and dealer partners all over the world. Many retailers that have been cooperating with Palm since 1996 are still our best partners, including Circuit City, CompUSA, J & ampr, Fry and Staples. Palm and its distributors (such as Ingram and Tech Data) and distributors (such as CDW, PC Connection and PC Mall) also have a cooperation history of 65,438+00 years.

There are also telecom operators representing the world's top mobile phone system operators and agents.

And employees who are full of enthusiasm and strive to convey the company's philosophy-the future personal computer system must be a mobile computer system.

Their support not only gives the company more creative inspiration, but also helps the company to formulate product development trends.

Today, Palm not only continues to provide all kinds of mobile computer system products-from the general notebook computer with the simplest function and the most attractive appearance, which costs less than 900 yuan RMB (US$ 100) to the super-powerful handheld computer equipped with wireless technology-but also lists smart phones as the development focus. These powerful smartphones allow customers to send and receive emails, access personal data such as contacts and calendars, listen to music, take photos and share. In addition, with the help of additional software, they can enjoy real-time TV programs, listen to podcasts or post them on their personal blogs.

Palm also attracts a large number of enterprise users. There are more than 8,000 companies equipped with Treo smart phones, and they all use GoodLinkTM produced by good technology as the standard software for enterprise e-mail. At present, among Fortune 1000 enterprises, 40% have already used Treo smartphones, and another 35% are testing or trying out. Frost & Sullivan found in a recent study that mobile professionals tend to choose Treo smart phone over other manufacturers' products for the following reasons: it has a large number of commercial applications, high flexibility, optional operating system, powerful functions and convenient use.

Palm hardware development

The early Palm hardware was very simple, the display screen was only black and white, and all of them used Motorola Dragon Ball processors. At present, the latest model of Palm no longer uses the Dragon Ball processor, but uses the same RISC processor as PPC. Processor manufacturers used include Texas Instruments and Intel. Its expansibility has also been greatly enhanced, and infrared ray and Bluetooth have become the basic devices. Most models use color display screens and are equipped with SD card expansion slots. Later, Treo Pro, a smartphone with Windows Mobile operating system, had AGPS and Wifi.

In 2004,165438+10.2, the handheld released the tungsten T5 handheld computer with 256M flash memory, which was twice as large as the handheld computer with the largest storage capacity on the market at that time.

In 2005, T5 won the Platinum Award of "The IT Product Most Concerned by Users in 2004" issued by Silicon Valley Power, an authoritative IT portal in the industry.

In May 2005, PalmOne regained the right to use the Palm trademark, officially changed its name back to Palm, Inc., and released a new logo.

In May 2005, PalmOne announced the launch of LifeDrive with micro hard disk and 4GB storage capacity in an attempt to seize the multimedia player market.

Palm announced two new models: TX and Z22 on June 5438+10/October 65438+February 2005. In the future, all new models will no longer use the names of tungsten and Zire.

On June 9th, 2009, Palm announced its new generation operating system webOS (previously code-named Nova) and its new Palm Pre at CES. [ 1][2]

[Edit this paragraph ]Palm Company

Palm, the main manufacturer of PDA system, has been working hard to improve the functions of PDA system so that people can access and share the most important information at any time. The company's products for ordinary consumers, mobile professionals and business people include Palm PDA, Palm TreoTM smart phone, Palm LifeDriveTM mobile home, software, services and accessories. Palm products are sold around the world through specific websites, retailers, distributors and wireless network operators.

Treo is undoubtedly one of the most successful product lines of Palm today. However, the relationship between Treo and Palm is more complicated, and the on-off and on-off during the period is also quite intriguing. Jeffrey Hawkins must be mentioned. Although Hawkins' name is not as widely known as Bill Gates and michael dell, he is a man of the hour in PDA history. He is one of the founders of palm and Handspring, and this alone should make him go down in Palm history.

Users familiar with palm history are deeply impressed by Hawkins' genius and creativity. Palm OS, which occupies half of the handheld computing market today, is developed based on GriDTask developed by Hawkins.

In 2000, the PDA market gradually matured, and due to the price war, the market profit rate began to decline. Hawkins' Handspring changed its strategy. When the smart phone was still a vague concept at that time, it joined the combination of PDA and mobile phone and launched Treo series products. Its vision of market and technology is unforgettable.

Handsping is technically successful, but it is not a commercially successful company. Hawkins focused on the personal study of brain thinking principle, ignoring the later operation of the company, which eventually led to PalmOne's acquisition of Handspring. Fortunately, the Treo product line was finally retained and carried forward by PalmOne, which made it brilliant today.

[Edit this paragraph ]Treo

Treo is a series of smart phones produced by Palm. It was originally developed by Handspring. After Palm acquired Handspring, the whole line was developed and produced by Palm.

Treo is one of the most popular PDA mobile phone series. Its functions include personal digital assistant, voice communication, email, web browsing and so on. In recent years, the model also has a built-in digital camera.

By September, 2006, the Treo model reached 14, and Palm OS was used until Treo 650. Since the 700 series, Treo models have used Palm OS and Windows Mobile respectively. Treo 700w is the first model to use Windows Mobile operating system.

Palm has reached an agreement with RIM to allow its Treo products to use software connections to connect and send and receive popular push emails.

In September 2006, Palm cooperated with Vodafone to launch Europe's first 3G mobile phone, using Windows Mobile operating system Treo 750v.

Treo products

* Treo 180 GSM

* treo180g GSM

* Treo 90

* Treo 270 GSM

* Treo 300 CDMA

* Treo 600 GSM / CDMA

* Treo 650 GSM / CDMA

* Treo 680 GSM

* Treo 700w CDMA

* Treo 700p CDMA /EVDO

* Treo 700wx CDMA

* Treo 750v GSM

* Treo 755P CDMA

software

In the software part, almost all Palm software can be used normally, and there are some specific software for Treo's keyboard and mobile phone. Its Chinese processing is still based on CJKOS, so the original related Chinese software can also run normally, but CJKOS's own input method is not convenient enough. Treo600/650 has a huge hard Chinese input method, which was developed by UGlee@Hi-PDA. There are also free hand-held easy input methods (which can support Wu Bi, Pinyin and custom code table at the same time), Treowb, plum blossom and other input methods. On TREO650, most input methods are better than Jujian developed by UDlee (it is said that Jujian has a subsequent version, but it was not actually released until the end of 2006).

[Edit this paragraph ]Palm has stopped developing Palm OS.

On February, 2009 1 1 Beijing time, Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm Company, announced that he would focus on the smart devices of webOS and Windows Mobile in the future, and there would be no more smart devices based on "Palm OS", except that Palm Centro would continue to cooperate with other operators in the future. This is really sad news for Palm fans, a helpless but only acceptable news.

In addition, Ed Colligan mentioned that the app store in Palm's new smartphone, Palm Pre, does not restrict users to buy programs here, but can buy programs from other unofficial "app stores", which is more open than the iPhone. Palm has signed an exclusive agreement with Sprint at present, but Palm will increase cooperation with other operators on 20 10. At the same time, Ed Colligan mentioned that there is no pending legal dispute between Palm and Apple.

If you give up Palm OS Palm, where will Palm smartphones go?

Palm OS finally fell. In fact, most Palm users or players in China (because there are only hardcore users who insist on using Palm OS phones) understand that it is only a matter of time. Poor web browsers, Wi-Fi and GPS, which are hardly seen on Palm OS phones, make Palm OS smartphones more and more popular and disappointing. Since PalmSource was sold to ACCESS in 2005, Palm has shown a marginalized attitude towards Palm OS. After giving up Palm OS completely, where will Palm go? Treo 750v, 500v, 800w and Pro represent Palm's attempts in the field of Windows Mobile. The flagship Treo Pro of Windows Mobile, which integrates GPS, Wi-Fi and high-resolution screen, is of great significance. Palm smartphones have integrated various mainstream hardware configurations for the first time, which also gives many Palm players mainstream models to choose from. However, at this time, thinner, more beautiful, more attractive and faster models than Treo Pro abound. Nokia E7 1, Samsung i780 and Blackberry 9000 all make Treo Pro feel ashamed. Simply adopting Windows Mobile operating system without further efforts on hardware is not the way out.

After the acquisition of PalmSource, Access developed Access Linux Palm (ALP for short) based on Palm OS. The media speculated that Palm would adopt ALP on the latest model, but Palm's new machine, Palm Pre, adopted a brand-new operating system, WebOS, and did not use ALP. Palm chose not to follow other people's path except its own, and did not pity ALP with Palm OS descent.

Independent new operating system, we think this is the only weapon for Palm to survive! Palm Pre caused a sensation at CES 2009. Unique slide QWERTY design, easy-to-use and smooth UI and countless enthusiastic old users all contributed to the success of Palm Pre. In particular, Palm's future webOS models are worth looking forward to.

In addition, we have to warn Palm in advance to start marketing seriously. Previously, the promotion of Palm smartphones in China was a complete mess, and it only developed slightly through the word-of-mouth of enthusiastic users. There is great pressure from iPhone, Gphone and Symbian, so Palm must explore its own marketing methods. Can non-open source webOS succeed? Is Palm Pre a phoenix nirvana or dying? Everything is waiting for the market to decide.