and the story continued..
All that wouldn't get them down, quite on the contrary! They returned to the planning board and came up with the Pilot... This tiny machine included a calender, task list, memo writing and a genuine address book (rumours say that Bill Gates was very fond of his PalmPilot). Back then the Pilot was sold for a whopping $ 300. Jeff was especially pleased with the handwriting recognition software on board, that rapidly became very succesfull and made the Pilot stand out against it's competitors. In the first 18 months of it's release in 1996, the Pilot would sell in excess of one million units. In the year 2000 Palm, Inc became an independent company again, after being a division of US Robotics and 3Com (when they bought US Robotics in 1997). In 1998 Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky founded the company Handspring who would immediatly become Palm's toughest competitor. Their first and immediate success was the Handspring Visor (launched in 1999).
