I think it’s easy to forget the palm pre and webos because it wasn’t a competitor for very long, but to be blunt, it was the only decent competitor to the iPhone but in the 2008/2009 timeframe. Android was awful on launch, blackberry was completely behind, Microsoft had a plan that was decent but was too late. Palm really was the only real threat in the early days. They just didn’t have the money to iterate like apple (and Google).
They also, unfortunately, ran into hardware issues. They were exploring the novel battery form-factor and storage space when lithium chemistry was even less understood than it is now; they had a sequence of models with batteries that went EOL too quickly, enough to (at best) make them seen as unreliable in the consumer space and (at worst) seen as trying to put people on an upgrade treadmill (back when that was a bad thing, before people understood that would actually be Apple's whole model with iPhones).
As someone who was part of the developer community and had multiple of the prototype devices, both phone and tablet, I can say it’s not because of the software they lost to Apple, it’s because of the hardware. The hardware was plain inferior, even for the era.
I think the critical miss of that era was Research in motion not buying palm. I think that combination could have had a real shot of staying relevant. Rim basically already made hardware that would have worked and had tons of corporate support because of blackberry messenger. The patents between the two would have also been quite strong.
I'm pretty sure a tablet was released, then scrapped sometime in the first month or so after release - TouchPad, IIRC? It got no support from HP or Palm. I seem to remember a quote from some exec saying something like "the market demands a $499 tablet" or something like that, and TouchPads weren't selling. But when they were discounted to $99 - $149, they sold out instantly. They even did a second production run and sold more at $249.
This was a huge missed opportunity for Palm. WebOS was pretty good at that time. They needed more software for it - this is a perpetual problem for most platforms at launch. Seed the market with good hardware, invest in developers, and let it churn for more than 2 months before killing the whole thing.
My memory was that it was released and then two weeks cancelled when HP decided to close down Palm and sell off WebOS. I worked for a short time (6 months) working on the tablet setup experience.
And yes, then they were being dumped at fire sell prices of $99/149$ depending up the configuration.
