It's Palm Again

It's official: PalmOne is no more, and Palm Inc. is back.

No big surprise here. Ed Colligan, the company's CEO, had announced in May, at the PalmSource mobile developers' conference, that PalmOne would be reverting ASAP to its former name after paying PalmSource $30 million to buy out that company's rights to the brand name. (PalmSource and PalmOne were both spun off from Palm Inc., the company that originally created the OS and the devices that run it. Palmsource now owns the operating system, PalmOne makes hardware devices. At the time of the spinoff, rights to the Palm brand were given to a third corporate entity jointly owned by PalmOne and PalmSource.)

But I noticed that while the former PalmOne Web site is already up and running under its old/new name (www.palm.com), the Palm logo looks different. It still consists of the word "palm" inside a medallion, but the old logo was silvery grey; the new one is orange and has a different typeface. You can actually see the old logo, sort of, on the Palmsource Web site (or you can look up the original Palm Web site on the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org).

The new Palm logo was created by Turner Duckworth, which has created logos for Amazon.com and Coca-Cola, among others. Turner Duckworth also created the original Palm medallion, and the news release announcing the name change explains that the new typeface in the logo is meant to suggest the digital age, while the use of orange denotes energy.

So Palm is officially back. That doesn't mean Zire, Tungsten, and Treo are going away--it's just now OK to call them Palms. Personally, I never much liked the name PalmOne anyway.