Palm Soon To Be Resurrected By Alcatel in the US Smartphone Market

When is a phone brand actually dead? In the case of the venerable Palm with its original Palm Treo and other early keyboard phones some of which were internet enabled, the time may be ripe for a resurrection of this much loved brand.

The Palm brand has been treated a little like the old MGM film studio was back in the day which was sold over the years to various suitors who tried to find value in the brand, later sold off for parts, then rebuilt again. Palm has been treated no differently having been sold and resold several times over the years for its intellectual property, enduring brand and the WebOS operating system that has its own band of enthusiasts who still held out hope of a new Palm phone with WebOS.

The most recent acquisition of Palm was in 2011 to Hewlett-Packard who thought they saw something useful with the brand but were never able to do much with it. Alas nothing much came of the purchase. At the start of 2013 LG bought the WebOS operating system from HP for an undisclosed sum in order to use some part of it in their upcoming smart TVs. This put an end to the dream of Palm enthusiasts that there would ever be another Palm device sporting the WebOS platform.

Now die hard Palm fanboys over at WebOS Nation uncovered that the Palm trademark has been sold to a shell company owned by Nicolas Zibell who is currently the President, Americas and Pacific at Alcatel One Touch, the mobile phone maker.

Visitors to the Palm.com website are now being redirected to mynewpalm.com with the Palm logo and a modified message:

The slogan on the site morphs between one that says “coming soon” and “smart move” which also just happens to be the slogan used by Alcatel One Touch, owned by the Chinese company, TCL.

So it looks like Alcatel found value in the Palm brand and are seeking to relaunch it, most likely into the American smart phone market. In essence Alcatel are “doing a Lenovo” who recently successfully acquired Motorola Mobility in order to help gain a better foothold in the American market which doesn't yet recognise the value in their Lenovo smart phones.

Certainly while Alcatel is not a household name in the States, Palm has an enduring following being one of the original personal digital organizers (PDAs) which many remember fondly. It won't come with the WebOS any longer, most likely a version of Android or less likely Firefox OS, but it may not be too long before the Palm brand is reborn once again rather than just being traded for parts from one corporate buyer to another.

It's about time.