Palm Reveals New Name

dmehus writes "Milpitas, Calif. based Palm Inc. announced Sunday afternoon the new name and moniker for its handheld hardware business. After almost two years in the planning and focus group stages, the company's Board of Directors and executives decided on PalmOne. PalmOne's ticker symbol will change from the current PALM to PLMO. Sister company PalmSource, which will be the operating system business, takes ticker symbol PSRC. According this report by CNET News.com's Ina Fried, the two companies will be publicly traded, but they will also be controlled by a new holding company. In addition, the Spring 2004 line of handhelds will adopt the PalmOne moniker. Devices that run the Palm OS can continue to say "Palm powered." The new ticker symbols and corporate name changes will take affect some time in late September or early October, once the Palm buyout of rival HandSpring is complete."

Re:I don't know about you

[stevel]

The Pilot Pen company sued Palm (then 3Com or was it US Robotics at the time?) for trademark infringement - and the agreement was that the name "Pilot" would not be used for the PDAs.

I'll keep calling my Tungsten-W a "Palm" (though my wife refers to it as "your nag".)

Re:What about...

[FooAtWFU]

What, One isn't cool enough of a buzzword? I'll go toss my RealOne player (not that I used it- winamp!), my Sun ONE studio (hey! That was cool!) and, while we're at it, ignore Formula One racing and... and... I'm sure I'm missing lots, too bad it's hard to get a list...

Handspring's OS is Palm OS

[cloudless.net]

Handspring is a hardware company, and it uses the Palm OS.

Re:One question?

[jalefkowit]

You can't get a Visor from Handspring now, and you haven't been able to for a long time. All their organizer-only devices have been discontinued, from the original Visor up to the recent Treo 90. The only way Handspring will sell you a Visor is if you buy a reconditioned unit [handspring.com] from them.

My guess is that PalmOne will continue this level of support for the Visor, but I strongly doubt that they'll start the production lines rolling again, especially when the bare-bones Zire and upcoming Zire 21 models are there for people who want a low-cost, monochrome organizer.

Re:Palm is so leet

[centavo]

The numerical 1 in the logo is intentional, as stated in PalmOne's press release. It is not an accidental font issue.

http://www.bargainpda.com/default.asp?newsID=156 2& showComments=true

Re:What about...

[thebigmacd]

Unfortunately for your joke, Formula One has a "one" in it for a reason...it is a division of the Formula racing series, in which there is F1, F2, and F3.

PalmOne

[pcp_ip]

PalmOne [studio2f.com] - a unisex fragrance for geeks from ClavinKlein

Re:what's in a name

[Anonymous Coward]

that's Silicon Graphics, Inc. The abbreviation was something that came afterwords.

As forseen by prophecy

[babbage]

Coming to the story late, I see everyone griping over either [a] "why are they ruining a perfectly good name?", and [b] "what's with the digits 1 and 0 in the logo?" Both are fine points to argue over -- or have everyone argue the same side of the argument, as Slashdot readers are wont to do :) -- but there was actually a reason for this, as an article written last week [brighthand.com] on Brighthand.com [brighthand.com] foresaw:

When it comes to names, few companies are as unlucky as Palm. Several years ago it was forced to abandon the name Pilot -- as in Palm Pilot -- when Pilot Pen Corporation claimed ownership. Now it's being asked to leave the name Palm behind as well. While it's not unusual for a company to change its name (in fact, Palm did it once before when it shortened its name from Palm Computing), the reason behind Palm's upcoming name change is unique. And it has something to do with what happened to Apple Computer.

[....]

[....] Apple Computer in the 1980s was much like Palm today; it built the computers and wrote the software to run them. And it owned the market. But Microsoft came along with its operating system, MS-DOS, and licensed it to computer manufacturers. The rest is history. Apple now has 3% of the market while Microsoft has gone on to become one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world.

The similarity with Apple did not escape Palm management. So it began a concerted effort to license its operating system, called the Palm OS, to other companies -- something Apple failed to do early on. Handspring, Kyocera, Samsung, Sony and others jumped on the Palm OS bandwagon and incorporated it into its handhelds. While this staved off the encroaching threat from Microsoft and established Palm OS as a platform, Palm still had a major problem. Licensees worried that Palm, as both maker of the Palm platform and user of the Palm platform, had an unfair advantage when it came to devices. So Palm addressed their concerns by dividing Palm, Inc. into two business units, Palm Solutions Group, which would make handhelds, and PalmSource, which would develop and license the Palm platform. They created a "Chinese wall" between the entities, with the Solutions Group becoming a licensee of the platform from PalmSource, just like other licensees.

[....]

Palm realized there was only one solution: split the company into two independent businesses, and give all rights to the Palm name to PalmSource, which it will then license to other companies.

Which leaves the Solutions Group with an unenviable task: change its name -- with no reference to Palm -- and hope that consumers follow. And with the PalmSource spin-off expected to be completed this fall and new handhelds from Palm rumored for October, we expect the new name to be announced very soon -- possibly even this week.

So this was, for better or worse, a necessary move, and while the name may not be great, they may not have had many other options. As some of the recent Mozilla spinoffs have seen, coming up with a good, unique name can be a royal pain in the ass these days (Chimera, Firebird both having been forced to change & possibly change again...). There are worse things they could have done than go along with the $foo-"one" meme that's so trendy these days...