Palm Kills Foleo
I missed this last week when it came out, so I’m sorry for being late to the party, but I just realized that Palm has killed the Foleo before it made it to market. I think that’s too bad — it seems to me that the media panned the Foleo unfairly just because it didn’t understand what value this sort of tweener device could bring to the market — if done right. Maybe I’m wrong in thinking this could be a nice product, but then again, I’m a little weird — I tend to focus on tethering abilities in phones, broadband over mobile and so on, as I think that’s the way to go.
In either case, it won’t have a change to prove itself at this point.
Currently when I travel I hate being forced to rely on the stars to align and WiFi to be available wherever I need to compute. And I like the idea of an ultraportable that doesn’t run Windows. (I kinda trust Palm to deliver a decent OS experience; moreso, at least than Microsoft. I wouldn’t mind a Mac OS-based ultra-portable, and maybe Apple’s growing expertise with mobile will help them build some sort of 3G into an ultra-portable that also switches to WiFi…I can hope. Meantime, Foleo was damned close to shipping.
I see the argument that they don’t want to focus on a Linux-based Foleo if their phone platform is headed in a different direction. That also sounds like a bit of an excuse to me — after all, they presumably knew they were developing two different platforms when they announced the Foleo this spring.
Anyway, the Palm folks at least hint at a Foleo II sometime in the future. We’ll see if, by then, they’re still defining the segment or just playing catch-up.
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