The written musings of a long-time Apple //e and Macintosh tech nerd. Opinions are my own.
In honor of “Throw Back Thursdays”, here’s a Palm OS device family photo I took recently.
In that top row, we have the original Palm Pre, an H/Palm TouchPad, and the elusive Palm Foleo. The second row includes an early USRobotics Pilot and a 3Com Palm Pilot (both running Palm OS 2.0). You’ll also notice that a Fossil smartwatch on the far left of the fourth row. Lastly, you’ll notice that I do have a Palm Treo 750 (Windows Mobile 6.0).
Happy Throw Back Thursday!
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…]
Through a very long string of back channel communications, I have received a question about moving data from a Handspring Visor Deluxe to a webOS device; I think it was a Pre.
There is no direct way to move data between a Palm OS device and a device that is running webOS. Both operating systems were developed by Palm before being acquired by HP, but the underlying technologies are vastly different. But there is still hope for people looking to move data from an old Palm OS device to a new webOS smartphone or tablet.
Keep reading for suggestions on how to move your data.
The easiest option is to work with a Palm OS device that is capable of HotSync’ing with Palm Desktop on a Windows XP machine.
You will need to start by downloading Palm Desktop if you don’t already have it installed. Once you have your data synchronize with your PC, use the File > Export commands to backup your data. You will need to do this for the Address Book/Contacts, Date Book/Calendar, To-Do List/Tasks, and Notes/Memos one at a time. Backing up your data helps make sure you that you can get back to where you started if something goes wrong.
Next, you need to use the Data Migration Tool (DMT) to copy the data out of Palm Desktop and into a location that a webOS device, like the Pre, Pre2, or TouchPad can talk to. My personal suggestion is to move your Palm Desktop data into a Google account, as webOS was designed to work with Google’s Gmail and Calendar applications from the very beginning. All the directions that you will need can be found on the HP website for the DMT. (Select Palm Desktop for Windows and select your webOS device from the drop down list to get started.)