Ever since the decline of its original Palm line heralded the end of the true “PDA”, the various properties that once made up Palm have been the digital equivalent of hot potatoes. Consider Peanut Press, which started out as an independent e-bookstore, was owned by Palm for a while under the name “Palm Digital Media”, was spun off to NetLibrary and renamed “eReader”, and was eventually bought by competitor Fictionwise—which was then bought by Barnes & Noble to form the basis of its Nook e-readers. Now the latest anonymous rumor has it that the remnants of Palm itself, currently...

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...

The big story in the world of tablets and e-readers that broke this weekend involves the HP TouchPad. A sort of chain reaction took place starting when a big box retailer shipped hundreds of thousands of unsold units back to HP, which suddenly found itself swimming in unwanted tablets. The sales figures were spectacularly unimpressive: that retailer only managed to sell 25,000 out of the 270,000 tablets it ordered, and deal site Woot only sold 612 of them when it offered them for $120 off earlier this month. The sales figures remind me of the much-maligned JooJoo from...

Back in November, I mentioned that Salon Magazine was seeking a buy-out or merger. The magazine was subsequently involved in talks with Michael Wolff of Newser.com, but the New York Times’s DealBook section reports that the talks have collapsed in the wake of the Huffington Post sale. Apparently the high $315 million selling price of the Post caused Salon’s board members to wonder whether they were pricing the magazine too low. Salon Magazine was one of the first magazines to recognize the potential of e-reading, strongly influencing me to take my first step into e-reading technology with the purchase...

Nieman Journalism Lab Editor’s Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. We could call this week a paid content free-for-all, but that’s self-contradictory. So let’s call it a pay-for-all, a fray of still-developing schemes that are certain to keep morphing as both competition and publishers’ heads spin ever more quickly. It’s a head-banging adventure to figure out what’s unfolded just this week. Apple offered a proclamation of policy, and given its aversion to talking with the press...

Recently I replaced my iPhone 4 with an Android-powered Samsung Captivate. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Graffiti, yes, Palm Graffiti, is now available for Android! Access, the current owner of Graffiti, has released it and it works like a charm on my Android phone. While not ebook related, I'm sure many of our readers grew up with Palms - that's where I first started reading ebooks - and remember Graffiti well. I was amazed at how my "muscle memory" allowed me to complete strokes I hadn't made in years. I can either use my finger...

Back in January, I blogged on my personal journal about how “even in the information age, nothing beats getting carded.” I observed at the time that even in this age of digital bits freely flowing back and forth, when so many other paper forms of communication are beginning to be endangered by e-quivalents, and ten years after the Palm’s infrared beaming was supposed to supersede it, the humble business card continues to be extremely useful. Now the Washington Post has taken notice of the phenomenon, with an in-depth look at how business cards are still being used today....

Pre Central reports on an interesting tip that has come in from an anonymous tipster concerning Palm’s next smartphone, codenamed “Mansion”. Whether this Mansion has many rooms, apparently none of them will be locked—because unlike the Pre, this device will not have any keys—making it the first Palm device without a hardware keypad since the company phased out the last of its original line of PDAs. Certainly, leaving out a keyboard might be a good way to lower the price on the already inexpensive Pre line. And Palm is no stranger to making devices without hardware keyboards,...

Several reports on forthcoming or no longer forthcoming hardware hit the news yesterday. Most notable is the report from Nick Bilton at the New York Times “Bits” blog that notes the Kindle is just the beginning of the range of devices Amazon wants to invent to make it easy to purchase digital content of all kinds, not just e-books. According to anonymous sources, Amazon’s “Lab 126”, the division responsible for the Kindle, was originally intended to create lots of projects, though it has focused solely on the Kindle so far. “Jeff’s original goal for...

Following up to yesterday’s post about iPad alternatives, John Paczkowski at All Things Digital reports that inside sources at Hewlett Packard tell him that HP’s Android slate that was supposed to come out in 4Q2010 has been delayed and will not be released this year. Paczkowski speculates that HP may be planning to concentrate on its new subsidiary Palm’s planned WebOS slate PC. HP has said it plans to expand WebOS beyond smartphones to other platforms. Perhaps they are concentrating their resources in that direction, and the Android slate will not be released at all? Regardless, knocking...

As we all know Palm has been sold to HP. Normally I would not consider this a TeleRead subject, but I'm quite a Palm fan and have been since their earliest days. As a matter of fact I still write for the oldest Palm blog on the net PalmAddict. As we see the passing of Palm, I have been following all the articles I can on the subject - after all I knew, and wrote about, most of the major Palm players before the Apple crew moved in (Ed Colligan never did get it when I told him...

A while ago, I reported on Palm putting itself up for sale. It was uncertain whether it would find a buyer—several companies including HTC and Lenovo reportedly considered it but decided “no sale”—but today the announcement came that Hewlett-Packard is slapping down $1.2 billion to take Palm home. There are stories about this all over the place. A couple of the more interesting ones: TechCrunch’s MG Siegler talks with HP VP Brian Humphries about HP’s plans for Palm. I asked Humphries to expand a bit about webOS and how it stacks up to...