foleo

SAN FRANCISCO--When I first glimpsed the Redfly from Celio at this week's CTIA show here, I thought I was staring at a Palm Foleo.

But while both are "smartphone companions," there are a couple of key differences. First and foremost, the Redfly hasn't been shelved.

Also, although the Foleo was touted as a complement to a smartphone, it had its own Linux-based operating system and application development apparatus.

As noted in January, the Redfly looks like a laptop, but has essentially no processing power or storage of its own. Rather, it's designed to hook up … Read more

In the hardware world, the first-mover strategy only works if you get it right.

For example, let's consider Palm's Foleo. Introduced last May at the D: All Thing Digital conference, the Foleo was supposed to be a $499 lightweight "mobile companion" with a full-size keyboard. Sure, it looked like a 10-inch laptop, but it was woefully underpowered, and it was designed to only work with Palm's Treo smartphones at first: modifications would have to have been made to support other phones.

Faced with mounting criticism, Palm made the correct decision in September to postpone the Foleo project … Read more

If the sudden rush into subnotebooks by major PC vendors is any indication, it's worth considering whether Palm's Foleo wasn't such a lame idea.

Photos of a subnotebook from Hewlett-Packard, reportedly called the HP Compaq 2133, showed up on the Web recently. And another major PC vendor, Acer, is also rumored to be entering the subnotebook fray sometime soon. Neither company will confirm anything, but in the case of the HP Compaq device, an industry insider tells us the product is for real and that the company began seriously looking into the category in November 2007. When … Read more

Mark your calendars, my friends. On September 12, Palm will be making an announcement about a "new device" from their friends "across the pond." Eh? Well, we certainly know it's not going to be the Foleo. According to Palm employee Stephanie Richardson's blog, the news won't be about the Palm Centro smart phone, either. So what oh what could it be? Do you guys have any ideas? Or what would you like to see from Palm?

Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced on the Palm corporate blog (here) that Palm has decided to cancel the impending release of its Foleo "mobile companion"-- a small, lightweight notebook computer running Palm's own software platform. The Foleo was expected to ship sometime soon, so development was probably almost complete.

It looks like Palm has taken down its Foleo pages-- all product pages and searches for "Foleo" on palm.com go to that blog announcement-- but there's some information on Wikipedia. There are some press releases for the Foleo on Palm's press site, including the original Foleo press release.

Perhaps the most useful page is… Read more

Give this to the folks running Palm: At least management had enough insight to realize the company was about to commit one of the biggest blunders in recent tech history.

Palm late Tuesday announced its decision to cancel its Foleo mobile companion only four months after its co-founder, superstar developer Jeff Hawkins, gave the product's first public demonstration at the D5 conference. A $500 mobile companion for e-mail was going to be an impossible sell, so maybe this is a good contrarian sign to Palm investors that the company isn't as brain-dead as some of its harsher critics … Read more

Suddenly, it seems even more fitting that a company called Elevation Partners recently took a stake in Palm.

This might be rock bottom for the storied mobile-computing company. The decision to cancel the Foleo even before letting people get their hands on it is an embarrassing admission that Palm's vision of the computing world is way off base from the rest of the world, and it's a black mark on the otherwise stellar career of Palm founder Jeff Hawkins.

It's hard to dump too much on Hawkins. The man invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo. I … Read more

Faced with biting criticism of the Foleo, a Linux-based psuedo-laptop gadget, Palm has decided to cancel the first generation of the device.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan broke the news on Palm's official blog Tuesday after the close of the stock market. Just last week, a financial analyst predicted that Palm would have to delay the Foleo's launch until September or October because of serious software-related bugs, but Colligan decided to kill the entire project instead.

"In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a … Read more