Palm Cancels Foleo

Posted 09/4/07 at 09:03:42PM | by

Robert Strohmeyer

In a post on The Official Palm Blog today, Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced that, after careful deliberation, the amazingly cool Linux-based notebook-esque mobile accessory heretofore known as the Foleo would, henceforth, cease to exist.

Just at the brink of shipping the Foleo, Colligan will cease all production and abort the nascent platform before it ever sees the light of day. And frankly, I can't say I blame him. Having played with the device at Linuxworld Expo last month, I found the Foleo's functionality absurdly limited, barely improving on the functionality of the Treo 700w to which it was wirelessly linked. And as much as I'd love to see another mobile computing victory for Linux, the Foleo simply wasn't destined to be anything of the kind. And what Linux doesn't need right now is consumer computing failure.

So, farewell, Foleo. We hardly knew ya. But ultimately, that may very well be for the best.

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Makes sense

Submitted by BasiliskSt on Thu, 2007-09-06 09:36.

I read the blog and the rationale was based more on focusing limited development resources on the next Palm platform rather than continuing a project that while promising is based on a separate platform.

I've used Palm Treos since the first flip-phone model and am a likely candidate for the Foleo. My Thinkpad Tablet is great at some things, but soooo slow on start-up. I could make an argument for the Foleo as a customer.

As a business, the need to succeed on the new platform is central to Palm's continued existence. Focus on the essentials is a good business answer that I respect.

Palm Cancels Foleo

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