Verizon is reportedly planning to launch a Palm-branded Android phone

It’s interesting to see old phone brands that died down in popularity years ago have a revival, with BlackBerry and Nokia being two of the most famous examples here. These two smartphone brands are owned by different companies, TCL and HMD Global respectively. They are also experiencing contrasting reception in the smartphone market as sales of BlackBerry-branded devices are much lower than sales of Nokia-branded devices.

Palm is another old brand which has experienced a lot of success in the past, as the company pioneered PDA devices back in the 1990s. It also launched webOS to compete with Android and iOS, but the venture was not successful. The company was sold to HP in 2010, with webOS rights being sold to LG in 2013. TCL acquired the rights to the Palm name back in 2015.

Last year, a TCL executive confirmed that the company was planning to launch Palm-branded smartphones in 2018. Now, Android Police states the current plan is that at least one such device will be launching on U.S. carrier Verizon Wireless in the second half of 2018. The phone will be powered by Android, but apart from that, nothing is known about its specifications.

Android Police notes that Verizon has been a long-time partner of Palm. The carrier had sold most of Palm’s webOS phones, including the Pre 2. It also intended to carry the Palm 3, but HP canceled the phone before it could be released in the US.

As of now, it’s unknown whether the Palm-branded Android phone will have a normal slate touchscreen form factor or something different (such as a slider having a hardware QWERTY keyboard). TCL’s recent BlackBerry-branded phones haven’t been a huge hit recently, but that doesn’t mean that Palm-branded phones will receive the same reception. It all depends on how well the phone is executed in the market. On a different note, it’s worth noting that the legacy of webOS lives on in gesture navigation, which is starting to become popular in some Android phones.

We expect to learn more about the upcoming phone in the coming months.

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Source: Android Police

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