But... a change in HP's leadership sapped support for webOS. The new CEO, Léo Apotheker, wasn't wrong that building webOS into a competitive and profitable platform would take much more investment than the already profitable HP Enterprise business. The TouchPad wasn't a huge seller at launch and Apotheker quickly shuttered the webOS operation. tl;dr: webOS was great, Verizon screwed Palm, HP saved Palm, HP screwed Palm and sold it for scrap. It was one of the dumbest moves in tech history, right up there with Yahoo's failure to buy Google, or Kodak burying their digital photography tech to protect their film business. The young smartphone market could've supported a third ecosystem, but HP cared more about IT services. HP worked to open source webOS, and LG bought the remaining webOS engineers and assets. webOS lives on today as excellent LG smart TV software. HP's surprise 2014 sale of the Palm brand to TCL was a hint of what was to come. TCL was contracted to build BlackBerry's Android phones, then flipped the arrangement and licensed the BlackBerry brand. Resurrection TCL's teased Palm occasionally through the years, and in early 2018 committed to new Palm devices. It was welcome news for Palm fans — TCL has manufacturing expertise and scale, global carrier partnerships, and has made excellent phones like the Alcatel Idol 4 and BlackBerry Key2. Good brands are hard. Established brands with positive history are harder. There's a reason TCL spent millions for rights to the BlackBerry name; same with HMD Global for the Nokia name. Even trusted old Kodak is still licensed and slapped on all manner of garbage. BlackBerry and Nokia got well-deserved second acts. According to the latest leaks, TCL is giving Palm the opposite. A new Palm phone is coming to Verizon — it's a tiny thing running customized Android on bare-bones specs. Very little about it evokes the Palm that I knew and loved. It looks like a shrunken iPhone X running Apple Watch software.