The Mystery Of Palm Has Been Solved

Will Alcatel OneTouch resurrect Palm?

I had a post in progress and was going in circles.

Then Jonathan Ezor tweeted me the link to that.

Alcatel doesn’t have the best record in the time they’ve popped up on my radar. From September 5, 2013:

For all those looking for an eight-inch tablet that isn’t necessarily an iPad Mini clone, Alcatel — which threatened to release an eight-inch tablet at the last CES but never did — has a new one called the Evo8 [Google English and Google English].

It’s not exactly pretty but it has a true Smart Cover, with an LED built-in that displays an icon for incoming Notifications via 3G. Unfortunately, this has an unknown dual-core CPU, running at 1.6GHz, and a miserly 4GBs of storage. We have to wait for AnTuTu scores and full specs to see if this is worth any money at all. See the posts for embedded videos which I’m not including here.

And that’s the last mention of Alcatel here!

So, for tablets, I have no hope.

As for phones, well, here’s a review of their flagship:

That it has a stylus is kind of promising. But will their phone have Graffiti?

And yeah, I expect it to be an Android-based phone.

This is a Polaroid situation in some ways. Although they’ll own the Palm trademarks outright — not license them as Foxconn has with Nokia — it’s unlikely there’ll be any actual Palm beneath the brand name.

Unless they’ve decided to buy StyleTap too. But that’s going pre-webOS and is a doubtful proposition. As for webOS, don’t expect any of that. LG owns all of it.

So what we have here is a company that doesn’t really have impressive products and a record for showing things it never puts on sale wanting to go around in drag with the Palm logo as a dress.

CES is next month. I expect the Big Unveil to happen then.

Unless they — pun intended — drag it out until March, when Mobile World Congress happens.

Previously here:

Palm, Is That You?