Schadenfreude: Palm shuts down Foleo
From Palm’s own blog (emphasis mine):
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 of 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 develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.
It’s a good move, really, since neither I nor anyone I regularly read could make any sense of what purpose the Foleo was really supposed to serve.
From Valleywag:
For years now, Palm cofounder Jeff Hawkins has been promising his company will come up with “a new product category” — some leap of the imagination, akin to the original PalmPilot handheld organizer, that will define an entirely new submarket of gadgets. The Treo smartphone was, genuinely, such an advance. And the way Hawkins talked up the Foleo, the lightweight, underpowered Linux laptop he revealed at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year, you’d have thought it, too, was a real breakthrough. Hawkins may have fooled himself, but he fooled no one else, including, at long last, Palm’s own management.
Sucks to be Jeff. I mean it. Palm did genuinely innovate with the Treo line, which RIM countered by adding phone capabilities to the Blackberry line. And then Apple comes along with the iPhone and seals the deal.
But if Palm is saying they need to focus on one platform only, I do hope it’s Palm OS. I’ve never gone in for the Windows handheld devices, and if Palm abandons its own operating system, they might as well marry this early adopter and longtime loyal customer off to Apple.
