Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm’s next-generation (Linux-based too) smartphone platform. My Take: A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device.
Palm Cancels the Foleo
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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the marked for PDA’s is dead. smart phone have taken it and rightfully so. the fact of teh matter is palm is not going ot make a come back in a major way. they will hold onto the market chare tehy have as it slowly slips away.
as a parting gift though it would be nice if the released the BeOS code
:edit: disregaurd BeOS comment as it is incorrect.
Edited 2007-09-04 22:19
as a parting gift though it would be nice if the released the BeOS code
Except for the fact they don’t own the code anymore. Take that one up with Access.
You have a few things messed up. Palm is not the same as Palmsource (which owned the code, until Access bought them).
As for this kind of device, it does have a place in the market, but not yet. It must be smaller, and a phone too.
And yet, when people such as yourselves make statements such this: “…the marked for PDA’s is dead. smart phone have taken it and rightfully so….”, no one has *ever* correctly argued the following question: If smart phones have “killed” the PDA, what do you do with your $200 Treo when you switch carriers with an incompatible service (Ex. GSM vs. CDMA vs. whatever)? You end up with…..a PDA =]
I don’t think it was the fact that the market wasn’t ready for the device. I think the device in and of itself was really kewl. The problem is that the market was just not willing to pay out the ying-yang for this type of device with smartphone and the new budget sub $300 pcs hitting the market soon. They just need to drop the price to subpc levels like maybe $199-250. I assume the problem is that they probably did not budget for having to sell the device at that price, and would have been taking a hit on each device with no method of recovering the losses…But they did say in its “current configuration”.
…in that they really need to concentrate on getting a next gen OS out. I still use my Tungsten E2 (as I haven’t needed to upgrade yet) but am running out of patience with it’s limited capabilities, compared to other hand held devices I see.
P.S. Nice to see another submission from you, Eugenia. Always glade to be reminded of both your past and present input.
Should I be ashamed since I was kinda looking forward to this? I didn’t like that it was tied to a smartphone though. I got a little hands on at this years Linuxworld and I really liked its shape and size; perfect for taking on a plane etc. I’d much rather take one of these than my clunky laptop.
Not at all. I wasn’t completely happy with the price, but it looked like the perfect device for what I need when I go on the road — a featherweight wordprocessor, with all day long batter life, that will allow me to access the web.
In the end, I couldn’t wait any longer and bought a TX because it’s the biggest screen I could get on a PDA and so far, it’s worked very nicely with my bluetooth keyboard, but I really wanted a single unit.
the only way this could have been “successful” was ultra-cheap.
I am glad to see this project shelved, as it was not the right direction for them.
I understand the viewpoint of the people that wished it had been developed though. It would be awfully nice to have kind of a super-sized N800 for some around the house tasks. But that’s all I see for something like this right now.
anyone else know of an ultra light laptop with instant-on functionality that doesn’t require standby to achieve it?
No. About every semi-modern computer relies on standby to achieve instant-on. No modern OS initializes fast enough for instant-on without standby. You might get close if you find one with a very fast POST and an extremely stripped down Linux or DOS, it wouldn’t be very useful to most people.
Even most cell-phones, palmtops, media players and also the Foleo also rely on standby.
no, the foleo relied on using flash ram, which didn’t require power to keep memory, like most new pda’s(and some cellphones, although their drain is attributed to network).
You might get close if you find one with a very fast POST and an extremely stripped down Linux or DOS, it wouldn’t be very useful to most people.
It could be very useful to most people. I’m tired of waiting for computers to grind their way up to being ready. Not all of the services coming on need to be turned on right away; many could be turned on as needed if the OS were designed differently.
Unfortunately, making a risk of this nature succeed would require an investment of time and treasure that most companies are unwilling to undertake, including Palm. It’s cheaper to churn out more epsilon increments, even if this constitutes overkill for the average user.
For our part, we users are amazingly reluctant as a whole to switch to better technologies. I wouldn’t be willing to buy something of this sort if it meant learning a completely new paradigm and abandoning all my data of the last few years. The payoff doesn’t make up for the cost. It’s like QWERTY and Dvorak in that respect.
> the foleo relied on using flash ram, which didn’t require power to keep memory …
The Foleo uses flash ram for non-volatile storage and DRAM for program execution and volatile data, unlike older PDAs which used (battery-backed) DRAM for both. But they still rely on standby for instant-on, because rebooting WinCE/PalmOS/Linux every time is far too slow. And I believe so does the Foleo, unless they’ve done some very major work on Linux.
> It could be very useful to most people.
What I meant wasn’t that an instant-on computer isn’t useful, but that one that instants on to pure DOS (which can boot in about 1s on modern hardware) or to a very stripped down Linux console (you can probably get this under 3s if you compile everything as modules and use the most minimal init script) is not useful to most people.
I guess I didn’t write that right, I guess what I was saying, the foleo was unique in that it’s “standby” didn’t drain battery(well, as much as a lith-ion on the shelf would), unlike that of a true laptop, which has to keep the memory powered to have standby functionality – a feature that I sorely wanted in a device. I’d like to take a device a week or two from its last charge and turn it on in a split second fire off an email and back off again.
Depending on what functionality you want, one of the Nokia web pads might meet your needs. I have a pair of 770’s at home, and they’re extremely nice as lightweight network clients (web, news, rss, CIFS/Samba, VNC, mail).
I’m using three web browsers on them right now (Opera, Minimo, MicroB) to see which one I like the most. The latter two are Mozilla derivatives and seem fairly robust, but they’re also a lot larger than the Opera port to Maemo that the 770 uses.
It was really cool to use the 770’s VNC client the first time to control Firefox and slrn on my OS/2 box in the basement. Something about seeing a 4OS2 window showing on that little screen seemed really surreal.
Edited 2007-09-05 15:24
actually, I’d love the nokia 770 – if it had a keyboard. I wanted the foleo for web, email, and instant messaging(which I would have settled for AJAX IM until a real messaging app was ported). While the nokia has those features, so does my treo, but what I wanted was that with a nice screen, keyboard, and no boot time, or(as the suggested alternative) battery punishment for standby.
the both the 770 and N800 woulds with most fold up bluetooth keyboards iirc.
I’ve yet to find a good driver for the Nokia 770 and my ThinkOutside Bluetooth Keyboard.
hmm, this list a thinkoutside stowaway bluetooth keyboard:
http://770.fs-security.com/maemo-bt-plugin/
but maybe its not the same as you have?
main thing would be to have the keyboard support hid. then this driver should work 99% of the time (there is always that 1%). but if not then it will be a problem no matter what…
may i ask how your doing CIFS?
I’m using OS 2006, and I’m using one of the multiple samba clients available.
The specific samba client I use was a .deb package that installed via Application Manager, and it presents me with a nice GUI showing the workgroup and the various hosts and shared resources, and I can simply click on a shared drive to mount it on the 770. Very slick.
It doesn’t currently work with my Warp 4 FP15 boxes (it sees the shares but can’t mount them), but stock OS/2 uses a much older version of CIFS and I’m not currently running any sort of samba server on them (just OS/2 native peer-to-peer).
However, it *does* work with the Buffalo LinkStation I have (which runs Linux in ROM) as well as with the Win2K boxes I share drives from, so that makes most of my important stuff available to the 770.
I can provide more detailed information when I get home (I don’t have the web pad with me at work).
Edited 2007-09-06 15:38
no need, i found it.
its known as smbbrowser and i had looked at it ones before without getting it to work properly. this time it did so.
with that, maemoftp and more, it seems i can connect to most anything.
Yeah, I think that’s the one. Rather nice.
yep, sure is.
i just wonder what would happen if the community was left in complete control of the software side of the device, like what we see with openmoko and the fic neo.
I have a Nokia 770.
This year at the San Diego Comic Con I almost tossed the frelling thing in the harbor it caused me so much misery and frustration.
It gets it right in the areas of all day battery life, web browser, and nice screen, but the rest?
Okay, granted, I was trying to use it as an itty bitty wordprocessor — something it was never designed to do — but in between the 90 second boot time and the fact that I could get it to talk to the keyboard only 1 out of every 4 tries, or that it and the keyboard would stop talking to eachother without warning, it left me with tears of rage and frustration on several occasions and reduced me to longhanding my panel notes and interviews.
I realize that it’s the flaky OSS driver for the bluetooth keyboard that’s to blame, but if what a person needs is something small that they can connect to a touch type keyboard and use as an itty bitty wordprocessor that can surf the web, the Nokia 770 is NOT a good option.
(Because of a back injury, I cannot carry a laptop with me all day. They’re too heavy once I get a battery that meets my 5-6 hours of uptime requirement.)
Yes — that’s why I wrote the first qualifying sentence in my comment:
“Depending on what functionality you want…”
I actually don’t mind using the stylus keypad or the full fingerpad, but I really don’t do THAT much typing on it (some online forum messages, and some e-mail, but otherwise it’s mainly stuff like typing urls, etc.).
My wife uses Pidgin on hers all the time for chatting, though.
Edited 2007-09-07 19:12
Psion Netbook
(search eBay and find your choice of old-school EPOC32 netbook/Series 7 or new-school WindowsCE/Pocket/Mini-or-whatever-TF-they’re-calling-it-today Psion Teklogix netbook)
Sad news, I was looking forward to try it. But, from another hand, I did not believe they make it. It was incorrectly positioned from the beginning as “phone assistant”. It does not need any phone, if it has WiFi built-in. There is no alternative just now to the ultra-light, instant-on laptop without mechanical parts. And I thought about good usability, removing all this “modern OS” overhead. I would expect something like Nokia N800 with larger screen and keyboard.
grrr I miss PDA’s and dislike smartphones. I don’t want to replace my whole phone constantly just because of software changes and I want a bigger screen than a cell phone provides. Unless it will have a screen size like the iPhone but even that is too much money for something that gets replaced as often as cell phones.
Noone forces you to change your phone every 3 months.
I have an old nokia for years and I only changed because I was given an not-as-old one.
Besides, the purpose of having a *smart*phone is to be able to update the software instead of the hardware… well in theory, but MS and friends likely want you to update the hw just like they do on the PC.
Not forced, exactly, but I do see his point. When I converged with a Treo 650, I looked at it from two different viewpoints. On the one hand, I was upgrading my cellphone to a smartphone, greatly increasing my phone’s screen size, adding a keyboard and touchscreen, adding storage and playback options, real internet and mail, etc. On the other hand, I was downgrading from my Tungsten E2. I was getting a smaller screen (though the Treo is brighter and easier to read in daylight), some (older) software incompatibilities, a bulkier package overall, and a nice big antenna nub to get in the way. In the end though, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.
Now, what does this have to do with the discussion? Well, if you’ve ever lived with a Treo, you know the feeling of being cramped on screen space, especially when you’re used to a larger screen on your old PDA. (Edit: Yes, I know the resolution is the same, but the extra 0.8 inch or so on the E2 makes fonts much easier to read to my tired eyes.) Then out comes the iPhone with its comparatively huge screen, and you have phone envy. If you have the money to back up that envy, you get a new phone much sooner than you planned. Now let’s say next year the iPhone v2 has double the resolution. Screen envy rears its ugly head once again, and you find yourself upgrading again to keep up with your “needs”. Forced? No, but damn, it sure feels like it.
Edited 2007-09-05 00:52
I’m not sure when it happened or why it happened, but I’m very sure that it has happened.
Palm, an innovator in it’s own class, with top notch PDAs that really showed what can be done suddenly started to mess up.
In no particular order their mistakes
1. Dropping Palm OS and using Linux instead (Giving away the main reason why they were superior and suddenly became just another PDA manufacturer)
2. Localisation issues. By simply accepting foreign letters like the german ü etc, they’d not have to give away the european market
3. Fiddling about with devices. Do some Market research guys. Don’t produce a unit, put it in massproduction and regret yourself before release, be smart before, not after
4. Release updates plz. Between the last OS that you had and the upcoming release we saw years just pass.. what was this all about?
There are probably a whole bunch of things more, but the one that takes the price was doing the stupidity move of dropping their one main USP. Selling sources to Access.
Now finally regarding this device. The market is ready, make sure you price it intelligent and release it. Now that you don’t, Palm does still have no relevant product in the market. Maybe the form factor could be a bit different, but since you have no device at all on the market, maybe time to ship wouldn’t you say?
Besides, all this talk about smartphones (which are good). I’m not sure about you others, but for me, they’re fine for _reading mail_ hardly sending mail. This device could fill that void. Laptops are great in many ways, but most are clumpsy in my world (may it be weight, form factor, speed (for price)). This device would likely do pretty well….
Now once again, bye bye palm
“A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device.”
Surely you mean, the market runs circles around this sort of device?
we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo and they decide to cancel it? They are making some very serious mistake…
i dont know what your smoking eugenia, but can i have some?
there was some oddball details in the foleo (price and the need for a smartphone to get mail. the latter being the biggest wtf of the two), but overall it would be right up my alley and many others to that dont need that cpu-hogging windows to get their daily online life done.
I keep seeing people say that it required a smartphone for mail(or even required a palm phone specifically), but I can’t find anything on the foleo that backs that up, and I especially question that when they said it featured wifi.
i was wondering the same thing for a while, but got it verified here:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/10/palm-foleo–a-…
“A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device”
The market WAS ready for this about seven years ago, but the niche disappeared. Smart phones can do what the Foleo promised for e-mail, web and phone calls while being far more portable. The iPhone is a good example and it’s probably part of the reason that the Foleo was canceled. Today, only a fool would have bought the Foleo.
Edited 2007-09-05 08:51
Maybe toys like the Asus eee could fill the gap.
I’m convinced that there is a market for computers much smaller than laptops and larger than phones.
Maybe the “convergence” is not with phones but instead with large-pocket calculators (Casio, Texas Instruments) and multilingual translators.
IMHO, the main “error” with the Foleo was the insane price.
“I’m convinced that there is a market for computers much smaller than laptops and larger than phones.”
Much like how the MacBook doesn’t fill the same hole as the much loved 12″ Powerbook. Apple should release a 10″ laptop. They’ve got the OS and Sync simplicity to make it really useful.
I’m waiting for the iPhone to be turned into a neo-Newton.
I’ve thought about that… one review I read said it had a fragile feel to it (not surprising for a $199 computer). If I were to get one, I’d probably read the early reviews, and then look at a 10″ that’s coming after, with maybe 16 GB flash.
I think the 7″ screen would be too small for comfort, and then there’s two large expanses of plastic around the screen, where more screen should be, and that would bother me, too.
The 7″ screen’s about four times as big as the iPhone’s. It should be fine for light work.
I liked the idea of the foleo, prefering a display that’s bigger than a tiny phonescreen and an operating system that doesn’t get in the way or annoy me…
It had some promise…
This was almost a fatal “Focus Shift”
The Foleo was nothing new, it’s a BeIA type idea to draw investors to the company, and bet the whole shebang on a one-trick pony no one wants or needs.
If Palm can finally get their thumbs out of their butts and solve their OS issue, they’ll be here for quite a while yet. Palm reminds me waaaay too much of Apple in the mid 90’s. Strong brand, weak products, stupid management.
Is it just me or is this sentence from Colligans post:
“We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform”
ment to be:
“Ed, maybe you should rethink what you want to do, starting a new trend of WindowsOS-less mini laptops. This will never work out. Here, take this special deal with Windows Mobile and just let the Foleo go…”
I must be paranoid…
Why would I lug around a Folio in addition to a Treo, no matter the price? This was a solution in search of a problem.