Palm CEO and former Apple employee, Jon Rubinstein, will run HP’s Palm global business unit.
Palm was known for helping kick start the PDA industry with its Palm Pilot electronic organizer. Later, it released the Treo smartphone, and most recently it introduced webOS and the Pre smartphone. The Pre and the followup phone, the Pixi, however, didn’t sell as well as the company had hoped.
Palm had been suffering from poor sales of its webOS-based smartphones and had been shopping around for a buyer since at least early April.
HP purchased Palm for US$1.2 billion, which bought it all of the company’s technologies including webOS.