Palm Cancels the Foleo
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 09. 4.07
I so wanted a Foleo. I have been a Palm fan since they started, and loved the idea of a light notebook that tied into my Treo. Everyone thought I was nuts; one commenter said "If you buy one of these its like carrying a big I'm an idiot sign". I thought low power, linux, what could be wrong? I said "All of the Gizmodo and Engadget geeks trashing this thing don't understand that we are entering an era where low power, long life and no moving parts are going to be huge advantages."
Well, clearly they know more about computers than I do; Palm pulled the plug on it today. Palm says that they are working on a new operating system and the Foleo is a distraction: "after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. " From now on you can get all of your green computing information from Mark, I am outta this department. Full release below the fold.
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 smartphones that will take advantage of it.
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 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 deliver products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.
Because we were nearly at the point of 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. 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. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.
Jeff Hawkins 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. 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.
I would like to thank our customers for their interest in Foleo. I know there will be disappointed folks who were looking forward to carrying a Foleo for all their mobile computing needs. I am certainly one of them. I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution. We will make every effort to make sure we bring our developers forward to our next generation platform.
This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.
Ed Colligan
President & CEO
Palm, Inc.
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I'm going to agree with you that the foleo really had me excited because it meant a lot for us on the go business types.. but most of those on the go business types have really learned how to thumb type pretty well. The foleo wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a computer replacement, you wouldn't have been able to build presentations on it very well. It also is a pretty big distraction from what should be their primary focus right now, developing a new palm OS has been in the works for years and years! I really think its in palms best interest not to produce a low numbers product when they could finish the Palm OS and really wow people.
I'm happy you realized that someone else know more about computers than you do.
For example, your no-moving-parts paradigma is highly overrated in my humble opinion.
Do you realise that while a solid-state-disk cuts by 50% power consumption, we're just talking of 5 watts vs 2,5 watts ?
Considering that a Solid state disk costs more than 10 times than a moving disk (and has less space available), don't you think that those money would be better spent otherwise ?
I mean, you always have to think at a cost/benefit ratio, i'm not going to waste 600$ to save 2,5watts each hour. Those 600$ could better be placed in my fund to buy a more efficient heating-boiler for my house.
The main issue was it was tied to a phone as a companion, not a computer in it's own right.
But apart from that, it wasn't terribly well done or needed. Psion did it better back with the NetBook years ago at a time when laptops were huge and at best it had it's niche. Cambridge did it in the 80s with the Z88 too. Today people need more out of a computer than the Foleo and some smartphones are capable of most of the Foleo's tasks anyway.
What? I still haven't recovered fully from the death of the eMate. Now this?
Good riddance to a dumb idea.
The Foleo may have been too limited as a mobile companion but the general direction (ultra portable, ultra low power, long battery life) is right.
Soon, there will be a couple of low cost, ultra-portable laptops on the market (e.g. OLPC XO, eeePC...etc) and those will definitely capture a market segment.
A lightweight, low-power laptop alternative is a good idea. This wasn't a well-designed one, especially for the price. Given the limited functionality, it's probably better thought of as "a really large, expensive, and power hungry cell phone accessory."
Similar products, like the ridiculously-named Asus Eee PC, were announced shortly after the Foleo for far less, with better feature sets.
Palm Foleo: $500, tied to phone, no windows for "normal" folk
Asus Eee PC: $200, stands by itself, will run windows XP
There will be plenty of low-power ultraportable choices in the near future, but the Foleo was doomed from the start.
I agree with raygundan - 10 years ago the Foleo might have been hot stuff but compared to the state of the art it seems like there is a big performance and price gap that I just didn't get.
I just rejuvenated a 5+ year old Toshiba laptop that has a P3 processor and 512Mb of memory and you know what it runs Windows 2000 and goes great - boots fast, runs browsers and OpenOffice like a charm - even watched some WMV9 video on it with no problems at all. I'm sure when purchased it was probably a $2000 system, but today it would probably be lik that $200 Asus system. With Li-on and state of the art system integration I'm sure it could be a lot smaller, use less power and run for ages.
So I never did get why the Foleo was so dissapointing in terms of performance and battery life yet was going to be so expensive. I'm pretty sure that Palm just listened to the buzz and determined there wasn't going to be a market for their machine - if it was going to be profitable they wouldn't care about having two platforms - profit is profit.
I'm sure ultimately we'll see a healthy market for UMPC type devices like Intel and others are building running standard Linux distros tuned for mobile - e.g. the mobile Ubuntu version. I look forward to that day.