TCL, the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer that has Roku TVs and the Alcatel phone line under its wing, is resurrecting Palm. The smartphone brand was last owned by Hewlett Packard, but it was stripped, chopped up and sold in parts in 2011, with the last Pre smartphone not even carrying the Palm name - it was a HP handset instead.
However, TCL believes there is still some value in the name, even though all the mobile patents originally owned by Palm are now held by Qualcomm and the operating system, webOS, is LG's.
It will be releasing new Palm smartphones, it revealed during CES, from a new US subsidiary and the company claims that it will be retaining the same "Silicon Valley" style philosophy that made the original firm so interesting.
READ: Qualcomm expands vast mobile patent portfolio by acquiring Palm, IPAQ and Bitfone patents (update)
How it plans to do that considering it won't be able to use the same operating system and would have to licence any of the patents that made people fall in love with their Pre handsets is yet to be seen. There's also no timeline on when Palm products might hit the market.
That said, TCL has been doing some interesting stuff with its Alcatel brand of late, including the operating system agnostic OneTouch PIXI 3 line, which allows you to choose from Android, Firefox OS and Windows Phone when you purchase the device.