Over at PalmAddict, Peter J. Arts has an excellent article on the demise of Palm.  His retelling of Palm's history will bring back a lot of memories.  I loved my Palms and I think my Treo 680 was probably the best smartphone I ever used.  Of course, I started reading ebooks on my Palm.  Peter says: When I consider the demise of Palm (in its final, HP incarnation), two quotes come to mind: “The Palm Pilot…a successful design of human and computer interaction that remains all too rare...” (Stanford University computer science Assistant Professor Scott Klemmer: 2/21/06). “Never was such a valuable possession...

Our sister blog Gadgetell points out that it’s been just over a year since we first saw Steve Jobs come on stage with his clipboard-sized wonder tablet the iPad and show us for the first time just what it was capable of and how much it cost. Since then, the device has proceeded to redefine what we thought of as a tablet—certainly there had been tablets before, but none of them exactly set the world on fire. The iPad, on the other hand, did set the world on fire, opening up new possibilities for reading not only e-books, but...

Here’s a bit of sad news. The beleaguered Palm Inc. has put itself up for sale, working with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to try to find a buyer, Bloomberg reports. As we previously reported, Palm has been having a hard time lately as its devices simply failed to find a market. Word of the sale comes as no surprise; sooner or later something like this had to happen. In a way, history is repeating itself, because the original Palm ran out of money and had to sell itself to US Robotics shortly after getting started. If...

Here’s a blast from the past. In 2008, we covered StyleTap’s plan to create a Garnet Palm OS emulator for the iPhone, and the difficulties it ran into due to Apple’s “no emulators” clause. Now Engadget reports that StyleTap has finally come out with the software. There are just two catches, however: first, it only works on jailbroken iPhones (since Apple has not changed its stance on emulators), and second, it costs $49.99—an astronomical amount for an iPhone application. (In fact, for that amount you could probably find a pretty good used Palm on Amazon or eBay.)...

Where the iPhone conquered your pocket, the iPad will conquer your backpack. So says Tim Carmody on the Snarkmarket blog, where he puts down his thoughts about why e-books on the iPad will be more successful than some people think. Carmody starts with five common reasons skeptics give that e-books won’t take off on the iPad, and notes that most of them aren’t all that new. (Though he does not address the oft-heard complaint that people will not want to read from LCD screens.) He points out that those who buy the least expensive, 16-gig...