Palm Cancels the Foleo

It's Good News. Duh.

Fooleo, We Hardly Knew Ye.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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?

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

WAITAMINUTE!

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

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. ;)

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.

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.