Palm is one of the iconic mobile computing brands. In the late 1990s, the PalmPilot was the iPhone of its time, the first handheld mobile computer that had anything close to a mass market. But it was slaughtered by HP in one of the top five worst acts of corporate mismanagement in the mobile industry ever, and Palm looked dead ... until now.
A few days ago, the Palm website started directing to mynewpalm.com, which has the tagline "Smart Move." That's the tagline for TCL's Alcatel Onetouch brand of mobile devices. TCL is an upandcoming Chinese manufacturer which bought former French mobile powerhouse Alcatel's phone business a few years ago. In the U.S., it's mostly known for making inexpensive smartphones for T-Mobile.
Today, we possibly got another piece of the puzzle. TCL Alcatel announced the "Pixi 3" series of smartphones, which come in 3.5-, 4-, 4.5- and 5-inch screen sizes, and can be ordered by wireless carriers with the Firefox, Windows Phone, or Android OSes. One of Palm's smartphone lines was also named Pixi.
Alcatel sent us a press image of the Pixi 3 that shows the phone with an Alcatel Onetouch logo, not a Palm logo, and Alcatel has been making "Pixi" phones since 2013. But do you think it's a coincidence that it updated this line right now? I don't.
Alcatel makes a big deal about the Pixi phones being "OS agnostic," but you shouldn't think of these like the Geeksphone Revolution. Consumers won't be able to load new OSes onto these phones. Rather, Alcatel is positioning itself as a white label, custom device company to fulfill mobile carriers' demands.
Alcatel's been heading in the OSagnostic direction for a little while now. In September, it revealed the Onetouch Pop 2 line, which has a similar carrier-customization theme.
I asked Alcatel flat-out about the Palm connection, and it is being coy, probably because it has a big reveal scheduled for the Consumer Electronics Show next week. We'll get full details on, and hands ons with the Pixi 3 series then, and we'll make sense of this whole Palm thing.