Who owns Palm today?
TCL. The Chinese electronics maker confirmed in January 2015 that it had bought the Palm trademark from HP, and said it would set up a new Palm Inc. in Silicon Valley to work out what to do with the name.
Palm stopped being an independent business on July 1, 2010, the day Hewlett-Packard completed its purchase. Everything that carried the name after that was owned by somebody else, and it went three separate ways. HP shut the hardware and phone business in August 2011. The webOS software went to LG Electronics in February 2013. The trademark went to TCL.
So the answer splits three ways in 2026. Palm the company is gone. Palm the name is a dormant trademark held by TCL, which has licensed it out rather than build with it. Palm's software is alive under a third owner, running television sets. The only Palm-branded hardware since 2018 has been a set of wireless earbuds sold under licence, not a phone.
What did HP get for $1.2 billion?
HP announced the deal on April 28, 2010: $5.70 a share in cash, an enterprise value of roughly $1.2 billion. The transaction closed on July 1, 2010.
Todd Bradley, who ran HP's Personal Systems Group, said in the announcement that Palm's operating system was "an ideal platform to expand HP's mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices." HP was buying its way into smartphones, and it said so plainly.
What HP actually bought was a company that had already been through several owners and two identities since Jeff Hawkins started it, sold to U.S. Robotics, absorbed into 3Com, spun back out as a public company, split in two and reassembled. That corporate history is the subject of our piece on the rise and fall of the Palm Pilot.
By 2010 the valuable part was the software. webOS shipped with the Palm Pre in 2009, and reviewers liked its card-based multitasking well enough that HP bought the whole company mostly to get hold of it.
Why HP killed webOS in 13 months
On August 18, 2011, alongside its third-quarter results, HP announced it would discontinue operations for webOS devices. That was less than 14 months after the acquisition closed, and about 16 months after HP had told investors it was buying its way into the smartphone business.
The accounting caught up in November. In its fiscal 2011 results, released November 21, 2011, HP reported $3.3 billion in after-tax costs, or $1.56 per diluted share, tied to winding down the webOS device business together with the related goodwill impairment, amortization of purchased intangibles and restructuring charges.
Set against a purchase price of roughly $1.2 billion, HP managed to lose close to three times what it paid, in about a year. For a company that had spent the previous decade digesting its purchase of Compaq, the shape of the problem was familiar: buy a strong brand, inherit a platform war, discover the war is already over. Apple and Android had taken the market by 2011, and the same squeeze was already flattening BlackBerry.
Where webOS ended up: LG television sets
On February 25, 2013, LG Electronics announced it had acquired webOS from HP. The deal covered the source code, the documentation, the engineering team and the related websites, plus licenses to HP patents originally filed by Palm covering operating system and user interface work. LG also took over the Open webOS and Enyo open source projects.
Skott Ahn, then LG's president and chief technology officer, said in the announcement that the purchase "creates a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices."
The range he meant was televisions, and that is where webOS still lives. LG has since turned the platform into a licensing business, selling it to other television manufacturers under the webOS Hub name. Neither company disclosed a price for the 2013 deal, and neither expected it to move their numbers. It turned out to be the piece of Palm with a future: software written for a phone that lost, shipping on sets made by companies that never sold a handheld.
The 2018 Palm phone was a $349 accessory
The one product that put the Palm name back on a phone was strange by design. Announced on October 15, 2018 and sold through Verizon from November, it had a 3.3-inch screen and ran Android. It was built not by TCL but by a startup, Palm Ventures Group, which licensed the name, with TCL as its manufacturing partner.
It cost $349 outright, or $299 on a two-year Verizon contract, or $14.58 a month for 24 months. It was not really a phone on its own: it needed Verizon's NumberShare feature, at $10 a month on top of an existing plan, so it could borrow the number from the phone you already had. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors was an investor and the face of the launch, and was expected to wear it during warmups.
In other words, it was a $349 second phone for people who already owned a first one. Reviewers struggled to explain who that was, the idea did not spread, and no Palm phone has followed it in the years since.
Where to find one today
Nothing Palm-branded is sold new. Palm PDAs from the late 1990s and the 2000s, along with the small 2018 phone, trade as collectibles through sellers on Etsy. The only firm price is the launch price, $349 in November 2018, because secondhand asking prices swing widely with condition and packaging. Check the battery before anything else: a cell that small, sitting in a drawer since 2019, is the part that fails first, and on the older PDAs check that the screen still responds across its whole surface.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Palm still make phones?
No. The last Palm-branded phone was the 3.3-inch Android device sold through Verizon from November 2018, and no successor has been announced. TCL has owned the Palm trademark since it confirmed the purchase in January 2015 and has kept the brand dormant.
Who owns Palm now?
TCL owns the Palm trademark, confirmed in January 2015, after HP sold the name it had acquired when it bought Palm in 2010. Palm's webOS software is owned separately by LG Electronics, which bought it from HP in February 2013 and runs it on smart TVs.
How much did HP lose on Palm?
HP paid about $1.2 billion for Palm in 2010 and announced on August 18, 2011 that it would discontinue webOS devices. In its fiscal 2011 results HP reported $3.3 billion in after-tax charges for the wind-down and the related impairment, amortization and restructuring costs.