September 3, 2007

$10 Million Dolllars "Wasted": Palm's Foleo Is Discontinued

Palm posted on their blog a few hours ago that they are discontinuing the Foleo - their companion device to the Treo which was to be a "perfect" blend of mobility.

Ed Colligan, Palm CEO writes 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. 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.

Did Palm make the right choice? We'll never know. But I do trust the judgment of Palm's executives.

If you are looking for the right blend of mobility you must first look at what you want to do. If email and phone is your main need of communication you can do just fine with any number of Smartphones / PDAs. I recently brought a Motorola Q. I like it but it does have a few pain points. Like when you save a number from an incoming phone call you have to scroll through your entire list of numbers you can't input characters to look up someone's name as you can when you are dialing someone.

If you really need to do a lot of typing and full fledged email then you'll want to carry with you a notebook computer. If you give presentations for a living you'll need a notebook computer and other gear "just in case". Like an extra battery and other tricks of the trade.

As with all technology, the key is what is most important to you and how do you work. Once you have this in mind, you can then decide on the most appropriate technology to meet that need.

I covered the Foleo's launch announcement here.

0 comments