Palm cancels first-generation Foleo
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.
Palm says it's canceling the launch of the Foleo, but it will release a second version some day.
(Credit: Palm)"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 out next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market," Colligan wrote on Palm's blog. Calls to Palm representatives were not immediately returned.
Palm unveiled the Foleo at the D: All Things Digital conference in May to widespread skepticism, despite the fact that Palm founder Jeff Hawkins considered it "the best idea I've ever had." The Foleo is basically an underpowered laptop that's designed to give Treo users a break from typing e-mails on a small phone keyboard. However, few could figure out why smart phone users--who ostensibly own a laptop already--would want to buy a separate $499 device that could do little more than send e-mails.
Colligan said that Palm is still working on Foleo II in conjunction with Hawkins. But Palm has to focus on updating the Treo and getting the newest version of Palm OS--now based on Linux--to market before tackling a new category like the Foleo. Palm will take a $10 million charge associated with the cancellation of the product, he wrote.
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time) is that they are canceling their latest product. The Foleo was
such a non-starter it is amazing that it ever got as far as it did.
Now that they've managed to crawl out from under that steaming
pile of failure maybe they can get on with trying to make the
company relevant again.
suppose a blackberry doesn't suit you well - don't like the physical device, want more pixels, don't like the services, etc. you might well prefer a pure-voice phone that happens to have a bluetooth link to a device like a foleo (more usable screen, keyboard, OS, etc). telco's probably don't like this model as much because users would demand to buy just the pieces they need: don't give me any mail services, just forward my packets with decent latency and price. integration breeds lock-in, which is good for some customers and bad for others, but always good for all providers...
I hope palm makes the prototype foleos available somewhere for cheap. I'd like to try one.
Now maybe somebody at Palm will wake up and bring an
innovative, interesting PDA to market again. Palm has been
recycling the same old thing for years. I still like and use my old
Palm, but unless we get something with real Mac support and
better apps, Palm will be palming the dirt.
Palm has for the last five years squandered its resources. Is this what top management receive the big bucks for?
Move out of the way and let someone with vision in.
Remarquee
make the situation worse by releasing this..
company shoulda woulda could've been the leaders in palm
computing - but no.
Palm is toast.
Secondly they should be moving quickly. Microsoft's position in the Mobile Phone Marketplace is going to expand. There are rumors circulating that Microsoft is poised to take over RIM, the company that makes the Blackberry. Microsoft is not only the competition palm could face, Apple will gain continue to gain momentum with the iPhone. It might take a few generations for the iPhone to truly be business savy, but in some area's it will move into the enterprise market.
- A fine company that lost its focus
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by cesdewar
September 7, 2007 7:41 AM PDT
- Losing focus is very damaging. Better to walk in ANY direction than try and walk in all directions at once.
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(12 Comments)The puzzling thing is that Palm users are constantly telling Palm what to do and Palm constantly ignores it. I am really waiting to see if Palm's new handhelds to be released this fall will provide yet another generation of devices that don't support Wi-Fi. What Palm needs to do is simple and obvious - a robust Linux-based device with PACE to support all existing Palm applications and a good development environment for writing native Linux apps so the huge third party developer base will kickstart the new platform with a wealth of new and "prettier" looking apps - the Palm OS's 1980's vintage base GUI is showing its age badly. Supposedly this is on the way(?), but it's not a simple task from a technical point of view, and Palm must realize they need to devote ALL their technical resources to this goal - kissing off PalmSource (now part of Access) which was working on the identical goal was a dubious idea, but then diluting their internal resources with other projects was just asking for disaster.
The Foleo was not a horrible idea - perhaps just the wrong bad implementation - it could have been just an inexpensive piece of software that runs on a regular PC laptop/desktop and connects via Wi-Fi to a handheld - there is little reason for this to be a physical device when the vast majority of potential purchasers would be people who already have a notebook computer.
A Linux-based device would be far more attractive to the Corporate IT departments that have never really liked the Palm OS that much, but do have a positive attitude towards Linux, thus providing a better avenue of competition against Microsoft in that area.
Someone needs to get Palm to march to a single drummer...