Palm Kills the Foleo

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html">http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html</a><br /><br /><i>"In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. 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."</i><br /><br />Well, I think it is a good decision. They had to say what they did - the other alternative was "Well, it wasn't such a good idea. Turns out not too many people were interested in increasing the size of their PDA/Smartphone to the size of a small laptop, just without all of the functionality." So, I guess all of those abandoned <a href="http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft%3A*&q=jornada+820">HP Jornada 820</a> cases will remain unused for a few more months anyway.

[Janak Parekh]

While that's true, it also gives doubt as to whether Palm will ever launch a successful own post-Garnet platform. :|

--janak

[TOCA]

How sad, I was so looking forward to finaly skipping the laptop, from the equation :?

Well, back to looking at the HTC Advantage :|

[hamishmacdonald]

Hooray for a leader who has the courage to surrender his ego to his better judgment.

[inteller]

good choice. Now while he's at it, kill the 755p and tell those dorks at Sprint to get in the Windows Mobile camp.

[Eriq Cook]

It's about time. That device would have flopped and killed Palm twice over. There was nothing truly unique/different about the Foleo that a standard mini-notebook coupled with a smartphone couldn't do. Sure it ran on Linux but so what. The whole idea alltogether was bad IMO.

[IpaqMan2]

Well, with out really knowing how the end product would of been, i don't know if I agree with other people's opinion. Simply put - and at least at one time, I think the Palm OS could of survived as a platform on it's own. In order for that to happen it would of needed to move on to something other than a small form factor PDA.

For many people, a simple palm like Foleo device is all they need. Everyone who is reading this knows someone in our own little circle of life who finds the PC intimidating. A simple computing device that can provide the basics such as web browsing, emails, and run the same applications which the Palm OS runs I think would do well for them and still would allow them to move all of their applications and data from such a device to their Palm PDA. Even Microsoft wont completely do this with WinCE and it's desktop OS.

Anyway, in my mind that is how I would liked to have seen the Foleo become, but even that vision I believe is different than what Palm wanted to do. And seeing how Palm has long since lost it's market lead, the Foleo in it's current state would of only caused Palm to mis-direct even more of their resources and attention away from the Palm OS which they can't afford to do and would of been the final nail in their coffin.

And just because this is a Windows Mobile site, and the site owner is in "bed" with Microsoft, far makes the Windows Mobile platform the "best" for a portable device - there are still alot of improvements that can be done to benefit the end user. If anything, WM has no other real challengers. Hopefully the new Palm OS will be just that and keeps MS on their toes. Remember what happened to IE before Firefox began getting market share? It sat for years stagnant without any changes or improvements - we sure don't want that to happen to WM, do we?

[Ed Hansberry]

Well, with out really knowing how the end product would of been, i don't know if I agree with other people's opinion. Simply put - and at least at one time, I think the Palm OS could of survived as a platform on it's own. In order for that to happen it would of needed to move on to something other than a small form factor PDA.
You mean like the AlphaSmart? That didn't work so well... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

:wink:

[TOCA]

Hopefully the new Palm OS will be just that and keeps MS on their toes. Remember what happened to IE before Firefox began getting market share? It sat for years stagnant without any changes or improvements - we sure don't want that to happen to WM, do we?

Not to worry :D

There's plenty of competitors left out there, to keep M$ on their toes, like Nokia and their Symbian OS, R.I.M. And their Blackberrys, and Palm still lurking in the background, with a virtual new PalmOS, and/or Linux support from Access.

And lately eaven Apple's got their eyes on this lukretive (SP?) market, and a Gphone (Google), standing ready in the next alley, to jump in, on the bandwagon 8O

What the Foleo prommised was, that I could keep my trusty old PPC, and upgrade its functinallity, to the point, where I no longer needed a full blown Laptop, to do the last piece of work, when not at the office, with a readable SVGA screen, better keyboard, better VGA out support, and a few other goodies 8)