Alcatel Officially Confirms Palm’s Impending Return

TCL Communication Technology, the parent company behind the smartphone company Alcatel Onetouch, has decided to come out of the shadows and officially proclaim that it’s got plans to bring the Palm brand back into the world of tech. The company announced at CES earlier this week that Palm will be heading back to California and will be making some new devices. What those devices might end up being, however, is still being left a mystery for the time being.

A post on AndroidCentral reprints TCL’s press release, which provides a few clues but not very many concrete details about Palm’s imminent return from oblivion. This paragraph is, perhaps, the most specific (and still entirely vague) description of what TCL has planned for the Palm brand:

“Palm has always carried a lot of affect and emotions. That’s why TCL has set the direction to rebuild the brand involving Palm’s very own community, making it the largest scale crowd-sourced project ever seen in the industry.”

Interesting. The “largest scale crowd-sourced project ever seen in the industry”? Does that mean that TCL/Alcatel/Palm will throw a new Palm phone (running Android, I guess?) onto Indiegogo or Kickstarter and offer pre-orders for some fancy new device? Because if that’s not what they’re saying, I can’t even begin to guess what this means.

Additionally, TCL says that its objective with reviving Palm “goes far beyond proposing a more advanced device. It is to deliver absolute breakthrough innovations in Technology, Design, User Experience, Eco-system, Marketing, Supply Chain, and Business Models.”

There’s not much else beyond this list of words that actually tells us what Palm will do. It stands to reason that, yes, it’ll be a smartphone of some kind. I have a feeling, however, that it won’t have much in common with Palm devices from the old days. The company’s homegrown mobile operating system, WebOS, is actually living with LG these days, powering the company’s smart television line, not to mention a new smartwatch that may or may not be part of a larger product line set to come out down the road.

So without WebOS, what is Palm now besides a logo? TCL’s press release doesn’t tell us, and until we see an actual product, Palm may as well still be dead and gone. Alas.

[Source: AndroidCentral]