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Palm Pilot was the name given to several early models of personal digital assistant manufactured by Palm, Inc. (when it was a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics or 3Com). More recent models of PDA manufactured by Palm are not named Pilots due to name infringement lawsuits brought on by the Pilot Pen Corporation, but "Palm Pilot" has entered the vernacular as a synonym for PDA, regardless of brand.
The original inventors of the Palm Pilot were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, who founded Palm, Inc.. Before starting development of the Palm, Hawkins is said to have carried a block of wood, the size of the potential pilot, in his pocket for a week.
Because Palm, Inc. was a subsidiary of 3Com, the group of founders became upset that they did not have enough control over the Palm product. As a result, they broke off from Palm and founded Handspring in June 1998, which produced the Handspring Visor, a clone of the Palm Pilot that used a modified version of the Palm OS. Handspring merged back with Palm to form palmOne in 2003.
Palm Pilots initially ran on the popular Dragonball processors, a Motorola 68000 derivate. Newer ones, in common with many other PDAs, run using a variation of the ARM architecture (usually referred to by the Intel Xscale brand name). This is a class of RISC microprocessors that is widely used in mobile devices and embedded systems, and its design was influenced strongly by a popular 1970s/1980s CPU, the MOS Technology 6502.
Palm Pilots are beginning to merge with smartphones. The Treo 650 is the latest offering that combines a Palm Pilot with mobile phone, e-mail, SMS, and instant messaging. It is widely expected that Palm Pilots as a PDA-only device will disappear as multi-function Palm Pilots like the Treo 650 decline in price.
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