Crave

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 and focus on more pressing priorities. But late last year, something interesting began to happen. After watching the early interest in a different design, Asus' Eee PC, the PC industry began taking another look at the idea of low-cost lightweight laptops that couldn't handle Crysis but could get you up and running on the Internet.

Palm's Foleo is not what designers of the latest subnotebooks have in mind.

(Credit: Palm)

My colleague Erica Ogg, a smart and thoughtful person despite her baffling support for the Los Angeles Dodgers, thinks that Palm and Hawkins deserve more credit for coming up with this concept. Earlier today, she wrote, "but the Eee wasn't the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a notebook PC, but was meant to function more as a secondary device. That was the idea brought to us by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins with the Foleo."

I'm not sure I could disagree more. Just for a moment, I'll leave aside the fact that Asus announced the Eee PC just days after Hawkins introduced his "best idea ever," meaning company executives probably didn't throw together a blueprint for the Eee PC on the plane ride back from Carlsbad, Calif., to Taiwan.

This idea has been around for ages. Gateway had one. Toshiba had one. Sony had one. The problem with all of those designs was that they were too expensive, too underpowered, too clunky, or all three. Most were released well before wireless networking became ubiquitious, as well.

These days, with the price of processing power and storage at an all-time low, it stands to reason that people would be interested in compelling devices that won't replace your main home or work PC, but provide a decent experience running today's software.

Unfortunately, that does not in any way describe the Foleo.

Palm designed the Foleo as basically one thing: an adjunct to Treo smartphone owners who wanted a larger keyboard and screen for working through a day's e-mail. It featured a processor designed for 2004-era PDAs, and it was unclear whether it could play video. It came with just 256MBs of storage, nearly four times less capacity than a $49 iPod Shuffle. Toshiba's Libretto 20, a subnotebook introduced 12 years earlier in 1995, used a 270MB hard drive.

Chances are, the Foleo wasn't even as powerful as the smartphones it was designed to work alongside. The only thing it brought to the table that you can't find on an iPhone was a keyboard and a display. And the iPhone is cheaper, with a more powerful processor and boatloads more storage, and it can play movies, television shows, and music with ease.

Now consider the Eee PC (for the record, an even dumber name than the Foleo). It uses a 900MHz processor made by Intel; no powerhouse for sure, but at least it was designed to run PC applications. The base model comes with 2GB of flash memory for storage, and models with 8GB are available.

You're not going to edit home videos on this thing, but you can surf the Web, read and write documents, install third-party software written for Linux clients, and play songs and movies. And priced at $299 to $499, it's also cheaper than the Foleo.

Yes, the Foleo was also a small Linux-based notebook for around $500. That doesn't mean Palm and Hawkins deserve credit for correctly predicting the need for smaller notebook-style computers, because that's not what they designed. The only similarity between the Foleo and the Eee PC is a price tag, the Linux operating system, and a hinge.

Regular readers of this blog might be surprised at the following sentence, but it's true. The person who really deserves credit for the recent miniboom in small low-cost Linux laptops might just be Nick Negroponte.

If you think about it, the XO laptop has spurred far more development than the Foleo.

(Credit: OLPC)

I've had my disagreements with the One Laptop Per Child project and its methods, but those do not extend to the XO laptop itself. It's been a long and winding road, but Negroponte first outlined his idea for a low-cost open-source laptop in January 2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos (click for PDF).

In the months and years that followed, Intel and AMD each scurried to come up with their own proposal for a portable low-cost Linux-based system. The two chipmakers have scored more points slagging each other's ideas than they have in the marketplace, but their efforts working on these types of projects spurred other PC companies to get involved.

And the XO laptop has actually received some interest from regular folks in developed countries intrigued by the interface and design of the laptop. The XO is likewise not a very powerful system, but at least it can do more than read e-mail and browse the Web.

Let's give Palm and Jeff Hawkins credit for a lot of things--perhaps most importantly, the notion of truly mobile computing itself. But if the race to develop The Next Mobile Computer really centers around the Eee PC and its offspring, it won't be because of the Foleo.

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 the device will come to market, however, is still a question mark.

Palm founder Jeff Hawkins (right) shows The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg the Foleo.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

But there's likely to be even more news on this front in the next few months. So what's the genesis of the sudden interest in this category? It's easy to point to the Eee PC from Asus and its surprising and instant popularity. But the Eee wasn't the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a notebook PC, but was meant to function more as a secondary device. That was the idea brought to us by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins with the Foleo.

Hawkins, who invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo, insisted the Foleo was "the best idea he'd ever had." The product was roundly panned by critics and eventually dumped before it even came to market late last summer.

The idea of a small form factor computer that is tinier than a notebook with solid-state memory, running a light operating system, Web access for e-mail is being tweaked and advanced by some of the biggest names in computing.

It's happening despite the fact that it's still a vastly unproven category of computing, and previous attempts to define such a middling type of device (see: UMPC, MID) have largely failed. So what's different?

The attraction to devices like the Eee PC, and the XO from OLPC, is partly form factor, but mostly price. At $399 for the Eee and $400 for the XO (that gets one for you and one for a kid in a developing country), they're not necessarily functional as fully loaded primary PCs, but at those prices, you're not going to expect it to be. More importantly though, at that price it severely undercuts notebook PC leaders HP, Acer, Dell, and Lenovo.

Not coincidentally, the impetus for HP's experimentation in this category was its concern over the very low price tag Asus was able to stick on the Eee PC. Selling the mini-notebook at $399, even if it's a secondary PC and runs Linux, gives it a serious chance to further chip away at the already-declining average selling prices for notebook PCs. (The 2133 from HP will have an entry level model priced at $499, and will have a Via processor, we're told.)

But that kind of pricing also could represent a good opportunity for the HPs and Acers of the world. This type of subnotebook is aimed at a very narrow group of users, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, according to Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group.

The pricing shows "it's not focused on being people's primary computer," he said. "Like the MacBook Air, like the Eee, like the Foleo was going to be. We tend to think of them in the context of other notebooks or portable devices, but they're really not designed to be a primary portable device. It's designed to be a niche product that focuses on a very specific usage model."

But what is that usage model? There's not even an agreed upon term for this category. Subnotebook? UMPC? Super mobile Internet device? Or as Intel is apparently ready to call it, Netbook? That definition is important to the consumer. The lack of clarity as to the purpose of the Foleo was a major reason it didn't strike a chord with a lot of consumers.

"The tough part is, this type of product is trying to navigate narrow space between a notebook and a smartphone. It can't compete with a smartphone in terms of price and portability, but it can outperform a smartphone," said IDC analyst Richard Shim. "But at the opposite end of the spectrum, these OEMs don't want to compete with notebooks directly because they don't want to disrupt the growth engine and significantly (hasten) the decline in ASPs."

So was the Foleo as silly as Hawkins' harshest critics said? Maybe the execution and timing was off. Or more likely, he was on to something, but wasn't quite able to take the idea to the next logical conclusion. In fairness to him, he did recognize at the time that the Foleo's utility may not have been as obvious to the mass consumer as he'd hoped.

"The further out you are, the more people have trouble understanding. It's hard to go back in time, but when we did the Pilot, there were a lot of people that thought that was a stupid idea. I mean a lot," he told CNET News.com last year.

Maybe he'll be vindicated--at least partially--on this one too.

Palm

(Credit: Palm)

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?

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.

(Credit: Palm)

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 suggest.

Of course, you would never guess this was anything less than a bold and brave strategy move after reading the talkback postings on the Palm blog announcing the Foleo cancellation. The gist of the comments: Gee you're brilliant. What insight. And you smell like fresh lavender.

When you consider the flame wars that regularly attend even minor technology events, what's to explain this singular lack of passion? Maybe someone was sharing a big post-Labor Day mix of acid-spiked Kool-Aid. For the record, a PR spokeswoman told me Palm doesn't edit out negative comments.

So it goes. But why mince words? The Foleo very well may go down in history as this generation's equivalent of Microsoft Bob, another ill-considered flop that so traumatized its chief product manager that she decided to quit the business and marry Bill Gates.

Of course, the chief distinction here is that Microsoft's reputation wasn't riding on Bob.

As for Hawkins, who signed up for the thankless task of convincing the digerati that the Foleo would usher in a new product category, what does he think about all this? (Jeff, you've got my e-mail if you want to dish.) Considering all that's happened, it's safe to assume he wishes he could retract his quote that the Foleo was the best idea he ever had.

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.

If you were planning to camp out this week for the launch of the Palm Foleo, pick up the tent and go home.

Barron's Tech Trader Daily blog spotted a research note from Deutsche Bank's Jonathan Goldberg saying that Palm has delayed the launch of the Foleo, a Linux-based "mobile companion" that looks like a laptop but doesn't deliver anything close to a laptop experience. The device is now expected to ship in late September or early October, according to Goldberg. When Palm founder Jeff Hawkins unveiled the device in May at the D: All Things Digital conference, the company said it expected to launch it this summer.

The Foleo isn't ready for its debut, although some might argue it never will be.

(Credit: Palm)

The Foleo is meant to be a way to ease the pained thumbs of Treo addicts. Theoretically, a business traveler could use the Foleo to read, compose and reply to e-mails that would be too difficult to tap out on the Treo keypad. But it doesn't work with corporate e-mail software from Research in Motion or Motorola and isn't designed to work apart from a smart phone. For the most part, analysts and Palm enthusiasts were not impressed, although Hawkins called it "the best idea I've ever had."

But if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter whether it was the best or worst idea ever to spring from Hawkins' agile mind (after all, he is the guy responsible for the Palm Pilot and the original Treo). Deutsche Bank's Goldberg said software bugs are holding back the Foleo release, including "an inability to synchronize the Foleo with most models of the Treo, in particular the nominally high-volume Treo 680." Yikes. That's only the entire premise behind the Foleo.

You've got to wonder what's going on at Palm. For a detailed look at the problems faced by one of the pioneers of mobile computing, and some possible remedies, check out Engadget's "intervention" plea.

I owe an apology to my lunch companions at D5. When conversation turned to the Palm Foleo, I said it was a terrible idea. Overpriced, underfeatured, and too close to the well-established laptop market.

That was before I got my hands on one. It took me only a few minutes to develop a desire to get one of these for myself. This is partly because I tried the product while my back was straining from the messenger bag carrying my Thinkpad. The Foleo is tiny and light, yet big enough to hold a full keyboard and a nice screen.

Small, light, and useful. But too expensive.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It was also because I was in a rush, and the Foleo powered on instantly when I opened its lid (just like a Palm Pilot is instant-on).

The device does e-mail and it surfs the Web, and not much more. But most of the time, especially when I'm traveling, I don't need anything else.

Downsides: It's still too expensive. At about $500, it's over my personal tech budget for a device that does the same thing that my laptop does. And although it has Wi-Fi, you don't get full functionality unless you pair the device, via Bluetooth, to your mobile phone. This is because the Foleo's e-mail application relies on your mobile phone's e-mail client to feed it; the Wi-Fi connection is used only for Web browsing. Of course, you could use the Foleo for Web e-mail, but over a cellular connection that would be painful.

But I actually think this is great hardware for Webware. It's got problems, but it's a very slick and useful gizmo. I'd buy one if I could afford it.

See also: More Foleo pictures.

Click on the image to start the Palm Foleo slide show

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

So after all the months of teasing, Palm cofounder Jeff Hawkins finally unveiled the company's new mobile device at the D5 conference today: the Palm Foleo. A companion product for smart phones, the Linux-based Foleo looks like an ultraportable laptop and is designed to let you more easily view and edit e-mail and office documents, among other things. It synchronizes to your device via Bluetooth and features a 10-inch screen, full-size keyboard, and integrated Wi-Fi for those times when you need to see everything in full glory.

Hey, I can certainly understand the concept and thought behind the whole project (what smart phone owner hasn't wanted a bigger screen or keyboard), but do I think it will fly? Not so much. My smart phone and laptop pretty much have me covered at all times. There's not enough there to compel me to carry another gadget just to get a little more screen real estate and room to stretch my fingers. But that's just me. What do you guys think? You can take a photo tour of the device by clicking on the image above, then I'd love to hear your thoughts below.