The Phone That Beat the iPhone — Before the iPhone Existed.

Everyone says Apple killed Palm. Apple didn't. By the time the iPhone shipped in 2007, Palm had already built a phone that did everything the iPhone did — and insiders who saw both will tell you Palm's software was the better of the two. This is the real rise and fall of Palm, Inc. — the company that invented the smartphone before the smartphone, twice, and threw it away both times. It starts with a block of wood Jeff Hawkins carved in his garage, runs through the Palm Pilot becoming the fastest-selling computer product in American history, a $53 billion IPO that made Palm worth more than General Motors, the webOS Palm Pre that leapfrogged Apple, and ends with HP buying it all for $1.2 billion and killing the TouchPad after 49 days. If you ever owned a Palm Pilot, a Treo, or a Pre, this is what happened to the company you trusted — and where webOS quietly lives on today. We cover: what happened to Palm and why it really failed, Palm Pilot and the Graffiti alphabet, the Handspring Treo as the first true smartphone, the Palm Pre vs iPhone and what went wrong with webOS, the Ed Colligan "PC guys" quote, HP's Palm acquisition and the 49-day TouchPad, and who owns webOS now. Sources: Wikipedia (Palm Inc / Handspring / Palm Pre / WebOS), Computer History Museum (Revolution archive), PDA Museum, Forbes & CNN Money (2000 IPO), Engadget & Daring Fireball (Colligan Churchill Club quote), Tedium & CSMonitor (TouchPad 49-day shutdown), HP 8-K SEC filing, PCWorld (webOS: what went wrong), DisplayDaily (LG webOS). If you owned a Palm — a Pilot, a Treo, or a Pre — tell us in the comments which one, and what finally made you switch. Every week we tell the story of a company that built something the world still uses, then destroyed the people who trusted it. Subscribe if that's your kind of story. #Palm #RiseAndFall #TechHistory