According to a recent post over on WebOSNation website, HP has sold the Palm brand to the Chinese firm Alcatel Onetouch.
“We’ve been wondering for a while what is up with Palm.com domain, and it’s looking more and more certain that HP sold the brand and trademarks to Alcatel Onetouch. The first hints of this came from the teaser when the website started redirecting to mynewpalm.com, with a looping video of the Palm logo with the text “coming soon” and “smart move” beneath. “Smart move,” as it would be, is the slogan of Chinese smartphone manufacturer Alcatel Onetouch (a brand of Chinese electronics firm TCL). That’s not exactly a lot to go off of though, but it was enough to raise suspicions.”
The “coming soon” and “smart move” text and logo is actually a looping video file called “palm_animated5.mp4”. Oddly, the video didn’t play on my iPhone 6 when I used it to surf to the mynewpalm.com website. (It did work on my Mac with Safari 8.)
As a long, long time Palm fan boy I’m hoping that something good will come of the Palm brand.
UPDATE:
Upon further consideration, there are a few things that are still up in the air for Palm webOS fans.
1. I almost forgot that LG has purchased WebOS to power their line of Smart+ television sets.
2. I wonder what impact the sale of the Palm brand on LG, the Open WebOS project, and Gram (which is still online at gram.com) might be, if any.
3. What is to become of the HP/Palm webOS App Catalog store? According to the WebOS Wikipedia page, the App Catalog site will go offline in 15 days on Jan. 15, 2015.
[Via WebOSNation.com…]