Palm Cancels the Foleo

It's Good News. Duh.

OK, you didn't really see that coming.

http://foleocentral.blogspot.com

FoleoCentral is the news, opinions & review blog about the Palm Foleo Mobile Companion

Fooleo, We Hardly Knew Ye.

http://www.palminfocenter.com/comments/8621/#136783

This thing was such a flop that even PALM knew it was going to flop. Do you know how horrendous a product has to be to make Palm, the industry leader in alpha Golden Master products, have to cancel it? Beyond belief.

And there will be no Foleo II. This thing was CANCELED, not pushed back. Everything about the initial reports suggested the market would overwhelmingly reject this device.

Just start making PDA's again, Palm.

-Bosco
NX80v + Wifi + BT + S710a

And that post you linked to? Was about how Engadget need to get over themselves. If you think Palm's decision was based solely on their editorial, you're nuts.

Anyhow, naturally I blogged at a little bit of length about it. :)

http://tinyurl.com/ys6og3

<http://comments.deasil.com/> that is my tech blog. There are many like it, but that one is mine.

And you believe it? Tell me, do you still believe in Santa Claus?

>May even jutify the $600 price tag.

One would hope that whatever they release does "jutify" oh wait, I mean *JUSTIFY* the price they put on it.

>Foleo's biggest problem was its limited software package

There were bigger problems - software was one, poor market research was another.

>This will give Palm time to develop a much more robust offering.
>And perhaps come up with a better marketing angle.

I'm sure if Palm could market smoke they would...nowadays you need a compelling product to market.

>It's Good News. Duh.

It's bittersweet news. Good in the sense that palm realizes there is no market this overpriced crap.

However bad news as it (again) demonstrates Palm's inability to execute on an *announced* product.

More worrisome is the software issues behind Foleo's cancellation.

>It's overpriced for the meagre hardware it runs on, I agree. But it's innovative in a way that most hardware-
>driven upgrades are not. I think it deserves more respect than it's been getting.

Freak, the quote is from you. You now say cancelling the Foleo is a "good thing" yet you were extolling Foleo's nonexistent virtues a few days ago.

Take off your blinders and stop being a Palm apologist.

That =was= a worry, I believe.

PALM has outsourced just about everything w.r.t. software development now. All they need to do (all, he says...) is get someone on board who has a handle on managing software development by outsource entities.

We're all aware of what became the defacto operating system standard [Windows] at the time. As a result there was no market whatsoever for hardware that didn't work within the framework of that operating system. As a defacto operating system did take over, all other operating system markets and competition failed one after the other and the hardware manufacturers found themselves marketing for an ever shrinking range of software rather than the other way around.

Hardware has since become subservient to the operating system. It started around 1994 and is just as true today 13 years later. Worse yet, all the hardware manufacturers slowly bought each other out, further shrinking the hardware choices. So now the hardware manufacturers just make faster and bigger versions of everything that has been done before. We're still plugging in faster CPUs, more RAM, bigger hard drives, faster graphics cards and sound cards just to service the operating system. Hardware driven innovation cannot be afforded by the market any more. There is no money in it. There will be no market for it. Computers are boring.

......

So Linux was created to service the home desktop personal computer, and the PC is here to stay. For those who were looking for some excitement and enjoyment in using their computer, the defacto operating system just doesn't cut it. We want to tinker, we want control, we want power over everything. Or alternatively we believe in some sort of freedom or some combination of the above. So we use Linux. That is certainly how I got involved in Linux; I wanted something to use on the home desktop PC.

However, the desktop PC is crap. It's rubbish. The experience is so bloated and slowed down in all the things that matter to us. We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago. 10 years ago we owned supercomputers of 20 years ago.. and so on. So why on earth is everything so slow? If they're exponentially faster why does it take longer than ever for our computers to start, for the applications to start and so on? Sure, when they get down to the pure number crunching they're amazing (just encode a video and be amazed). But in everything else they must be unbelievably slower than ever.

Computers of today may be 1,000 times faster than they were a decade ago, yet the things that matter are slower.

The standard argument people give me in response is 'but they do such more these days it isn't a fair comparison'. Well, they're 10 times slower despite being 1000 times faster, so they must be doing 10,000 times as many things. Clearly the 10,000 times more things they're doing are all in the wrong place.

I think he's dead on the money. Palm built, from the ground up, a customised implementation of Linux that was instant-on and instant-off. Applications opened instantly. No need to save documents etc. To my mind, this is very impressive. Certainly more so than "Hey, here's yet-another-laptop - but it has a 2.3 instead of 2.1 ghz processor! Wow, awesome!"

If Palm proved anything with the Foleo, it's that they indeed have the talent and the capability to create a modern OS with innovative features that no-one else is attempting. They simply don't have the resources to support seperate OS's for both the Foleo and their smartphones. That, and the extraordinarily negative reaction it received, led to the decision to cancel it. It's a smart business move for Palm.

Thus, this decision is good news. It means that Palm will be able to focus all their talents on one platform, instead of splitting their attention across two. It also means they'll be able to take their idea of applications that sync across devices much further than the puny email syncing we saw with the Foleo. And it also means that if there is a Foleo II, they're going to have had a lot more time to put in the software that the original should have included.

It's quite disappointing that they've had to cancel it. But if one examines the decision objectively, then one can only conclude that it was the right call. It's good news. It would have been bad news if the Foleo OS was what was going to appear on smartphones in '08 - it would have meant there were serious problems. But since they've now explained that these were two seperate platforms, cancelling the Foleo seems an eminently sensible idea, both from a business perspective and for Palm's customers.

But you're not really interested in a real discussion. You just want a flame war. Sorry, not taking the bait today.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650 ---> Crimson Treo 680

WTF? In one para you praise the Foleo, then you condemn it. Which is it?

On the other hand, if Foleo's OS was an entirely seperate project, then cancelling it makes sense: Palm is a small company with limited resources and supporting & developing two seperate operating systems is a lot to handle.

There's no contradiction here: Foleo's a great idea, but version 1.0 was a misfire. It's not that hard to see both sides of the coin.

For you, it's a terrible blow. Now you don't get that Happy Meal as payment for "Blow By Blow: 10 Reasons Why The Foleo Is Better Than All Other Notebooks."

the desktop PC is crap. It's rubbish. The experience is so bloated and slowed down in all the things that matter to us. We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago. 10 years ago we owned supercomputers of 20 years ago.. and so on. So why on earth is everything so slow? If they're exponentially faster why does it take longer than ever for our computers to start, for the applications to start and so on? Sure, when they get down to the pure number crunching they're amazing (just encode a video and be amazed). But in everything else they must be unbelievably slower than ever.

Tim's right: Palm needs to have a single, unified, Palm-branded software platform. If Palm has a better idea for how its smartphone OS needs to be done (for example, one that will better meet what the carriers are demanding today) then Foleo needed to be pulled from the market until it could be reloaded with that new OS. Otherwise, Palm would be saddled with three platforms, two of which were up to them to maintain and extend. Likewise third parties that wanted to support Palm products would be developing against three different SDKs, which takes a pretty big commitment and limits Palm's ecosystem.

There are a few other reasons why rushing the Foleo to market wasn't ideal for Palm. As people have pointed out, a lot of your initial expectations of a device that looks like the Foleo is that it has a big library of software. Even if it addresses a serious pain point with just a few apps it's naive to think people are going to "get" that in the immediate way you need to market the product. I expect that when the Foleo is relaunched there will already be a sizeable software library ready because apps that developers created for the new Treos will be easy to tweak to run on Foleo.

What else has been seriously missing in the build-up to release of Foleo? How about announcement of BlackBerry support? I'm not sure how serious Palm is about this, but if they really plan for Foleo to work with other smartphones they should have BlackBerry in their pocket at launch time. That would probably require partnering with RIM to develop a sync module that runs on the device and has access to BB's email store, but it would be huge if they can do it before the re-release. The buzz would be quite a bit more positive, I think.

There's one other thing to think about. The Foleo team really nailed a lot of things that no other mobile Linux project I know of has done. Their OS is so much snappier than Maemo or the Zaurus operating systems and it seems to have very good power management. These low-level traits are critical to Palm's smartphone platform as well. So here was Palm, whose primary business is smartphones, with most of its best Linux talent tied up on the Foleo team. That's a problem.

All this time I've been wondering why Foleo was being rushed to market. I assumed it was the marketing department thinking Palm desperately needed a new product. That still could be true, but I wonder if it wasn't also that Palm needed its smartest people like Ben Combee over on the smartphone project and had to wait for them to get the core functionality and APIs of the Foleo done before they could do that. When it looked like they weren't going to be able to get Foleo where it needed to be without those people and their internal smartphone development was at risk of slipping without them, they had to make a tough decision.

Anyway, I'm really disappointed, but not just because Foleo has been put on a back burner. It's because despite the factors just mentioned it really was a sweet little system. The team that developed it deserves some respect.

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

Let he who is without Shift cast the first stone.

Now STFU about it.

And you still haven't answered my question about the disposition of your Foleo. Do you get to keep it?

And now that it's dead, can you say what software you had planned for it? Anything for consumers, or just for business?

Freak, we have no idea how Foleo worked because it was cancelled. It's not impressive because it hasn't been released.

The idea of Foleo was interesting - however it was far from compelling.

>If Palm proved anything with the Foleo, it's that they indeed have the talent and
>the capability to create a modern OS with innovative features that no-one else is
>attempting. They simply don't have the resources to support seperate OS's for both
>the Foleo and their smartphones. That, and the extraordinarily negative reaction it
>received, led to the decision to cancel it. It's a smart business move for Palm.

If Palm proved anything with the Foleo, it's that they do not have the talent and
the capability to create a modern OS with innovative features.

>And it also means that if there is a Foleo II, they're going to have had a lot more
>time to put in the software that the original should have included.

Freak, now you change your story? Earlier you were crowing about Foleo II, now you've relegated to "if there is a Foleo II" - maybe there is hope for you.

>But since they've now explained that these were two seperate platforms, cancelling
>the Foleo seems an eminently sensible idea, both from a business perspective and for
>Palm's customers.

Likely they're making this up as they go along.

>But you're not really interested in a real discussion. You just want a flame war.
>Sorry, not taking the bait today.

No flame war, I'm just calling you out on your hypocrisy. Foleo was a bad idea before it was ever announced!

Huh? It was Linux. And even according to Beers, it was better than that crap Maemo Nokia shat out. (For an N800-kisser like him to admit that made an impression on me.)

Well, I better stop replying for now and get the hell to writing my blog stuff...

Let me rephrase, "They do not have the skill to customize a modern OS"

"They do not have the skill to customize a modern OS"

And you still haven't answered my question about the disposition of your Foleo. Do you get to keep it?

You asked about my software plans. My plan is to develop a "mind mapping" application: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Mapping. I also was working on porting a Java SDK to the Foleo. I may still do this just for my own use.

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

It doesn't set a new standard for others to match because IT'S NEVER GOING TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

The hypocrisy that others have spoken of is this - for the past few months, I had to hear bullshit about how the Foleo is going to be so useful and will be a great compliment to the Treo. Now that Palm axed it, the same people are saying it was a wise move.

Know what that means? It means you don't form your own damn opinion. You take whatever Palm says as fact. If they say you need a smartphone companion, then you suppose your Treo really is lonely. If they say they're canceling the device a mere weeks from release, then you claim it's a smart business idea.

Wake up. This is why you guys are on the ass-end of every joke on this site. A few of you are so far beyond "fanboy" that "cultist" couldn't even do you justice. Palm is a shitty company. The quicker you move onto other platforms, the quicker you realize how disgustingly limited the Palm OS really is. It may have been useful a few years ago, but it is completely outdated today.

-Bosco
NX80v + Wifi + BT + S710a

As for the "forming your own opinion" comment, I can tell you that I personally have been talking to Palm for some time, urging them to get to a situation where the same code can run on both Treo and Foleo. I thought from the start that it was a mistake to fragment Palm's platforms and was actually working on porting a Java language SDK to address the issue. (I may still do that for my own use if they let me keep my Foleo.) In any case, there is no hypocracy in saying on the one hand that the Foleo addresses a real need in the market and is a nice piece of hardware and software, and on the other that it would have been a helluva lot better to have made the decision to consolidate the OS work before announcing the product. Now that Palm is saying that the two platforms are fundamentally different I think Foleo supporters would be foolish to say that Palm should try to support them both rather than committing to one. Saying it's a good decision to cut one of the OS projects doesn't mean that anyone thinks this was the time to make it. The time it should have been made was when Palm brought Paul Mercer in to help them rethink (or re-rethink) their smartphone OS work. I'd love to understand why this wasn't clear to Palm back then.

So thank God Palm didn't release the Foleo if they weren't committed to supporting its OS over the long haul. But damn them to hell for getting this far without knowing they weren't going to support it for the long haul.

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

BTW, did you ever try a Bluetooth mouse with the Foleo?!

But what does this have to do with the subject "RIP"? ;-) Don't tell me... no! Mike?

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

Didn't I read somewhere, maybe from Combee, that the Bluetooth was ONLY for syncing?

Er...maybe I'm thinking of this:

-- http://discussion.treocentral.com/showpost.php?p=1312861&postcount=86

Since when do subjects here NOT veer of course?!

Besides, you obviously didn't read this:
http://mikecane.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/ok-now-the-foleo-scares-me/

More Foleo posts tomorrow on my blog. If my time isn't swallowed like today.

Know what that means? It means you don't form your own damn opinion. You take whatever Palm says as fact. If they say you need a smartphone companion, then you suppose your Treo really is lonely. If they say they're canceling the device a mere weeks from release, then you claim it's a smart business idea.

No no no, you big silly. Originally, most people assumed that the Foleo OS was what we were going to see on Palm's smartphones next year. Since we now know that is not the case, Palm's cancelling the Foleo makes sense. It's certainly disappointing - I was really looking forward to trying one out - but it would seem to be the right call.

Wake up. This is why you guys are on the ass-end of every joke on this site. A few of you are so far beyond "fanboy" that "cultist" couldn't even do you justice. Palm is a shitty company. The quicker you move onto other platforms, the quicker you realize how disgustingly limited the Palm OS really is. It may have been useful a few years ago, but it is completely outdated today.

1) You erroneously assume that I (or nice, rational people like Beersie) actually give - to quote the immortal Spider Jerusalem - two tugs of a dead dog's cock what random wankers on the Internet think of my opinion. (I don't.)

2) The real cult is the "Palm is dead" cult. Everyone blathers the same old tired garbage about how the Treo is rubbish, Palm OS sucks etc. How boring to read it everywhere you go...

Are we hypocrites, die-hard traditionalists or.......something akin to Amiga users?

:-)

Remember, in the comments area of one particular story last year that I cannot recall, I was accused of being both a Palm apologist AND a paid Microsoft shill (by the good Dr. O)!!

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

WAITAMINUTE!

I still own two of those! (one an original "signed" 1000...whatta great computer (with amazingly bad marketing)).

The 1000 was (and is) classic...especially in the "signed" edition. It was just a pain to have to load Kickstart from floppy (did they ever release a ROM update card for the 1000 w/ the OS on it?). I actually had its little look-alike sibling in the Commodore line, the C128-D.

I personally always wanted a 2000 but it was just sooo pricey.

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

Are we hypocrites, die-hard traditionalists or.......something akin to Amiga users?

You, sir, are some kind of freakish, bizarre hybrid*! You need to be hunted down and quarantined, so scientists can dissect you and find out what makes you tick.

*Or possibly a Jedi. After all, only a Sith deals in absolutes. ;)

what about folks like me who say "Palm is Dead" and then in the same breath say "Long live Palm!". Are we hypocrites, die-hard traditionalists or.......something akin to Amiga users?

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

You haven't lived til you've tried to compile and run programs using Aztec C with nothing more than that internal and one external floppy drive. I think I managed a "Hello World" dialog box, maybe some sort of sound generator, that's about it before deep frustration set in. Got real good at swapping floppies, though!

> ...(did they ever release a ROM update card for the 1000 w/ the OS on it?)...

There WAS something, but the motherboard of the 1000 is, I believe, somewhat monolithic - unlike the expandable 2000.

Is that computer still ahead of its time? How's that Daphne chip doing these days?

A prime example of how great technology can get squeezed out of a contracting marketplace. (The Atari ST series got squeezed too, but it was just about crap. So I won't bother to mention that because I know the name JACK TRAMIEL raises hackles on the skin on Amiga Cuiltists. LMAO. Yeah, I owned a 1040ST. And I think it was my letter to Tramiel in a trade paper that got him to intro a laser printer for it. The world's *first* laser printer that used the host computer's CPU for image processing! Look at that: Tramiel listened to me. Maybe he should be running Palm.)

And really REALLY bad marketing - the infamous Guru Meditation Error could not have been...well...worse. Nothing like those words in BLINKING red staring you in the face when something went wrong. Sheesh.

The Video Toaster lasted well past the Amigas, remaining viable for years.

Good stuff.