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Palm Computing, Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, later co-inventors of the Palm Pilot. The company was started to create a PDA for consumers, called the Zoomer. The devices were manufactured by Casio and marketed by Tandy, while Palm provided the PIM software. The Zoomer failed commercially, but Palm managed to survive through selling synchronization software for HP devices, and the Graffiti handwriting recognition software for the Apple Newton MessagePad.
The company was acquired by U.S. Robotics Corp. in 1995. In June 1997, Palm became a subsidiary of 3Com when U.S. Robotics was acquired by 3Com. In June 1998 the founders became unhappy at the direction in which 3Com was taking the company, they left and founded Handspring. 3Com made the Palm subsidiary an independent, publicly traded company on March 2, 2000, and it was traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol PALM.
In August 2003, the hardware division of the company merged with Handspring, was renamed to palmOne, Inc. and traded under the ticker symbol PLMO. The software division became PalmSource, Inc.; the Palm trademark was held by a jointly-owned holding company.
In April 2005 palmOne purchased PalmSource's share in the 'Palm' trademark for US$30 million *. In July 2005, palmOne launched its new name and brand reverting to Palm, Inc. and trading under the ticker symbol PALM once again.
On January 4 2006 Palm released the Palm Treo 700w, the first Windows Mobile-powered Treo in a partnership with Verizon and Microsoft.
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