Palm Deletes Foleo Folly

Written by Adam Gosling

Wednesday, 05 September 2007

Handheld computing specialist, Palm, has taken the market's advice and decided to axe the planned release of its mobile phone companion product the Foleo - at least for now. Basically a dumbed down laptop computer that relied on a Palm smartphone to connect to the outside world, the Foleo was designed to give wireless email junkies access to a keyboard and a decent screen without all the trappings of a real notebook computer. But while the device was compact and lightweight it lacked lacked the power most reviewers felt would be required to make it truly useful. Palm CEO Ed Colligan made the announcement in his blog, blaming the fact that the Foleo was based on the Windows Mobile platform rather than its own next generation smartphone operating system which will be a Linux derivative. "We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one," he wrote in the blog. "As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphone that will take advantage of it," he said. Colligan explained in the blog posting that the decision to cancel the launch so close to launch was that it had become obvious the idea need a little more work before it had any chance of success. "Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus," he wrote. "Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on a second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform," said Colligan. Palm and the Foleo were roundly criticised when the product was announced with much fanfare back in May this year and it must have been clear to the company that its vision for a new generation of mobile devices was so far off the mark. Although it's doubtful the widely criticised device will ever see the light of day. It may just be on the back burner. "Jeff Hawkins (Palm's Founder) and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category," said Colligan. "We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first," he said. Related news items Hybrid Drive Boosts Laptop's Skillset -10/10/2007 Consumers Want FMC: Companies Don't See The Benefit -02/10/2007 The Poor Man's Palm -02/10/2007 Palm Goes Consumer With Treo 500v -12/09/2007 Vodafone UK Promises All-You-Can-Hear Music -12/09/2007 Newer news items Myer Honeymoon Over: EEE For All -13/01/2008 Samsung's New UMPC -06/01/2008 Eee Available Now Comes In Black -01/01/2008 Tiny Rugged UMPC WIth Vista -10/10/2007 Ultra-Mobile Sales Ready To Rocket -16/09/2007 Older news items With Half A Billion Cell Phones China Readies High Speed -24/08/2007 Not nano, pico -23/04/2007 Tag This Now: