I joined HP in order to fight Googles and Apples hold on the mobile OS market. Everyone can join the winning team, but I wanted to join the underdog. Then they dropped it before I even officially started. Pretty sad, even though I found other cool projects to work on, not much had the same potential to turn around the whole company imho.
I sold one years later for 90$~
Léo Apotheker.
He left Danger to go work for Helio, then Helio was acquired. He left Helio to go work for Palm, and then Palm was acquired.
Oddly enough, the team that wound up doing the OS for the iPod was in the mix during this timespan also. They pitched a product to T-Mobile, but T-Mobile wound up going with a competitor. So Pixo wound up selling their wares to Apple, and the rest is history.
Source: I am a former employee of T-Mobile, HP and HPE.
(wistful sigh)
At the time, I honestly thought it was all a bit silly TBH! "Why would I want to take a picture with my phone when I have a perfectly good camera?"
"Why does Paris Hilton have her pictures stored on OUR servers, doesn't she know that's a security risk?"
Fun fact - all those pics, from all the customers, were stored completely unencrypted. They were uuencoded for some reason, but if someone wanted to, they could've hoovered up every last file.
I was working the day that Paris Hilton had her account hacked, that was not a fun day. It was looking like some heads would roll, and then it turned out the hackers exploited her account by simply guessing her password. The initial fear was that someone had penetrated the network.
The Touchpad was only on the market for just over a month before being discontinued. Why do that?
WebOS had a lot of potential as a platform, to the extent that both Google and Apple subsequently borrowed major chunks of the UI.