Palm Officially Introduces the Foleo

rcartwright @ 5/30/2007 1:54:03 PM wrote

The price will tell the tale for me, but so far it looks way too big.

From previous article:

U.S. availability for Foleo begins this summer with pricing expected to be $499 after an introductory $100 rebate.

$450.00 price-by itself not a deal breaker (BTW, thanks for the pointer I was in a hurry when I first scanned the artice)

No touch screen/tablet feature-all I can say to this is WTF!

Size- as a 40 something attorney I have stayed away from the Treo till a few weeks ago because of small screen size, no WiFi and dislike for the thumb board. Right now I use a TX/Treo 680 in somewhat the same way as Palm sees the Foleo/smartphone pairing. Sync is a kludge and seamless sync has some appeal for me. I would submit that for the segment of the population that can't really see the small screen of a smartphone, this has some merit. Of course, the people who say I already have a laptop, I would respond as some others have that if its as light as advertised and as fast as advertised and if it has some built in flash drive, then there might be a market for it.

Alas, I may well not be part of that market.

"Many men stumble across the truth, but most manage to pick themselves up
and continue as if nothing had happened."
- Winston Churchill

You know what, if it had an e-ink display and really good battery life measured in days, I'd go for it. I need something to replace my paper notebook and magazines that I carry everywhere.

But as it is, I just think it's too small of a niche. I already must carry my laptop for work, the functionality in this doesn't come close to replacing it, so why would I waste space on it? It really doesn't make sense. I suppose some extremely casual users could have some use for it, but I think they've carved a very small niche with this product.

Palm: Do this with e-ink and a touch screen a-la the Irex Iliad (but with the battery life of the Sony Reader), and you've got a customer. Otherwise you are going down a well trodden path of stripped down laptops, internet only devices, email only devices, web-tv, etc. I suppose people think that they are going to get a million grandmas online with these devices, but that never seems to happen. They just don't fit the need for the rest of us.

March 30, 2007 will be remembered as The Day Palm Died.

When I first saw one of these, I thought it was actually just a sick joke. An elaborate in-house April Fool's joke. TreoMan assured me it was real. That was the day I finally gave up on Palm. The FOOLeo® is a product that needlessly diverted attention and resources from Palm's core products, resulting in fatal stagnation of both the Treo and Palm's traditional PDA lineups. Palm is too small to spread its (severely limited) talent around, especially on redundant designs. This company is so clueless that there is no way they will ever recover from the burden of being run by utterly IDIOTIC LEECHES that only care about plundering and parasitizing the company until the very end. Most parasites are smart enough to ensure that don't kill their hosts. Not Palm's management. These bloodsuckers have bled the company dry as they've continued to collect paychecks and cash in massive stock options.

The FOOLeo® is an answer to a question no one is asking. Let's see: Almost as big and almost as expensive as a Real Windows device, yet unable to run Real Windows apps? Break me off a piece of that! I'll take twenty! Any device much larger than the Nokia N800 that lacks Real Windows is pointless in this day of ever-improving Windows UMPC, Real Windows micro laptops and smartphones. The FOOLeo® niche simply does not exist. And organisms without a niche invariable die quickly.

Eventually it will be leaked that long ago Palm knew this product was doomed. The problem was that so much time + resources had already been wasted on it that by the time someone finally stepped in and said, "W T F is going on here? This is utter crap that will never sell." no one had the cojones to pull the plug on the project in 2005 when they should have. So now we have the latest equivalent of the Palm i705/DUNGSTEN T5/LifeDrive/Cobalt. As with Cobalt (PalmOS 6), failure to quickly amputate a gangrenous limb (product) will be remembered as the coup de grace that (mercifully?) ended Palm's existence.

What Palm should have released was a simple clamshell "PalmTop®" design along the lines of a CLIE UX50. With a 4 inch screen. Preferrably OLED. In 2005. With a COMPLETE software suite, including email, VPN, NetFront browser, PDF viewer, Word/Excel/Powerpoint-compatible suite. Keep It Simple, Stupid. The FOOLeo® with its current specs may have been a viable product category 4 or 5 years ago when I had urged Palm's product managers to consider a small PalmOS laptop with the simplicity of the AlphaSmart Dana. The key would have been to adhere to the KISS principle and not try to add features that the company's engineers were too clueless to easily implement. Palm is too talentless a company to be trying to reinvent the wheel itself. The FOOLeo® is the hardware equivalent of Cobalt: an unfinished, fundamentally flawed idea that is arriving 2 year too late to matter and will result in the death of the company. Maybe Palm should offer the FOOLeo® in a Special Edition Cobalt color?

The only questions that now remain are these: Now that it has finally been revealed that Emperor Hawkins Has No Clothes and that the Secret Third Business (STB) was a sham all along, who will buy Palm? What value does Palm offer a potential suitor? What assets do Palm have in their portfolio that a company big enough to purchase Palm couldn't purchase cheaper elsewhere or easily copy/develop for themselves?

Palm's "assets":
- A dead PDA lineup that hasn't seen significant improvements (or even a slightly refreshed new model) in years.
- A rapidly-aging set of bulky, shoddily-built smartphones that haven't seen significant improvements made to a 4 year old design. (There isn't much in the latest Treos that wouldn't have been in the 2003 Handspring Treo 600 had Handspring not been living hand-to-mouth + on the verge of bankruptcy when the Treo 600 was originally released.
- A laughable FOOLeo® product that - BY DEFINITION - has no target market that exists outside of Hawkins' dreams. (It's sad to see Hawkins embarassing himself trying to pimp the FOOLeo®. Remember the rhetoric we previously were subjected to re: the i705/DUNGsten T5/LifeDrive/Cobalt? It's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.)
- The phone numbers of HTC, Solectron and Inventec.
- Rights to rickety old FrankenPalmOS and the freedom to continue adding more bugs/maggots to the OS until the PalmOS corpse finally putrefies.
- Several hundred million $$$ in cash.
- The Palm and Treo names

"Who's gonna bid it at a billion dollar bill? Five, will you beat it on a billion and five, bid it on a billion and five, a billion and five. Who's gonna bid it at a billion and five dollar bill?"

If PalmSource and Chrysler (twice!) can get sold, Palm has a chance. It all boils down to how greedy the company's board is. Kinda hard to bluff when everyone at the table knows the cards you're holding are utter crap, isn't it, Eric?

TVoR
Copyright, 2007
TVoR, Inc.

I see where they are going with this. With a decent enough third-party developer ecosystem it could even work. The smartphone is supposed to become the "soul pad" of the new personal computer: the central repository for all your critical data around which everything else is just input/output devices. And I do think that's where personal computing will go.

But out of the box... I don't know. Is the lead solution on this thing--email--really going to be enough to make someone who doesn't carry a laptop around say "I need this thing"?

The software looks beautiful and simple. And the instant-on, instant-off aspect is more important than I think many people give it credit. I was really hoping we'd have a touchscreen. I can see developing some great business software that syncs between this and a smartphone. But I need Palm to get people to buy these first, and I'm not seeing the market driver here.

This is going to look to shareholders like Palm is trying to go head-to-head with Microsoft. And it's going to look that way because that's exactly what Palm is doing!

Wow.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

I think LifeDrive II more than adequately describes this.

Sorry, even if I'm repeating myself, this product just cries out for more accurate names: Flopio / Flopeo as you already mentioned, but more: Forgetteo, Fooleo, Noleo, or even No-Treo.

Thanks Palm, at least we have something to giggle at your funeral ;-)

IIIe -> m505 -> T3 -> Treo650 -> Treo680

You can Fooleo Somemeo Peopleo Somemeo Time.

But can't Fooleo Me!

Who could do that better than yourself, Mike?

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

a new version of HP's old Omnibook??

rpa

Yup yup yup.

EPOC and Palm-size PC. Oh, wait, EPOC died when almost everyone could afford to go out and buy laptops, and Palm-size PC bombed. I'm sure a third go at a non-standard system and OS with extremely limited capabilities and an absurdly high price point (for $499, you can buy a real laptop) will magically work this time around. After all, it says "Palm" on it.

The advertising on the Palm website is shilling the Foleo as something to use with your Treo. I am not going to buy a Treo and a Foleo, and I don't think anyone but the most rabid Palm fan would. People are going to use their laptops, not a Foleo. The original Palms succeeded because they integrated so well with existing PCs. The market is not so radically different now that Palm can get away with selling Treos that are effectively mobile internet access devices, and sell a Foleo that serves as an in between Treo conduit, when you have your PC that is far far more capable than being a simple Treo add-on.

Nor to program a regular laptop to interact with the same software that's running on all those F-compatible smartphones...

Oh it comes with a VGA adapter....presumably that means one more proprietary dongle to have to tote around & potentially get lost.

SD & CF slots? Come on, that's redundant. Sure there are plenty of CF peripherals out there but they all require drivers which will never be written for this thing. I'd like to see the CF slot jettisoned, an SDHC slot instead of regular SD (why does everyone but the camera companies refuse to move forward with SDHC?), and 2gb+ of internal flash. And, of course, a $399 or less pricetag without any of those silly mail-in rebates.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

hkk, a CF slot supports storage up to 16 GB right now, 32 GB soon, and no known limitations. Still want to toss it? :)