Foleo Canceled

[Shawn Pickett]

The Foleo was IMHO a good concept, but they had one major flaw in it. The price, for that much money, it needed to be able to do a damned sight more than it did. If they could've kept the price point under $200 to make it work with the Treo like they talked about, it would've probably sold like hotcakes. but at $500-$600, people are going to expect something more than a device that was essentially a bigger screen and keyboard for the Treo.

[minimalposter]

Agree Shawn. I think that the companion to the smartphone should not cost more then the smartphone.

[Dick Tracy]

This strikes me as a move not unlike Apple's pulling of resources to get the iPhone out in June, leaving their next OS waiting.

If Palm's resources are used wisely, their new OS will be ready soon, thoroughly tested, and the products will follow.

I thought something out of the ordinary was happening last Friday when I could not see a Foleo ad on the Palm homepage no matter how many times I refreshed.

[Girt]

My first thought upon reading the title was "Wait, I'm pretty sure this isn't April 1. This has got to be some sort of joke..."

I had the exact same thought. Wow. Caught me by surprise.

[Toe]

Sadly, this stikes me as Palm repeating the same pattern they've been stuck in for years now.


Let's make a neat-o new multitasking OS with bits of Be technology! Wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea... (Will we ever find out, definitively, what happened to Cobalt?)

Let's have the hardware and OS developed by separate companies! Wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea...

Let's make a sub-laptop computer that very little software will work with! Wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea...


Who knows, maybe they'll finally break the cycle and actually execute one of their big ideas successfully. They haven't exactly done much to restore my confidence, though.

[Girt]

Our dear Hawk just slipped up. He was brilliant when he saw the Newton, and fixed it and made PDAs popular. He was brilliant when he invented the first Treo. Interestingly, he did both of those *outside* the corporate world. Palm he invented on his own, and then sold the idea. The Treo was after he left Palm (they reeled him back in).

[Girt]

As far as the 'why' of the cancellation, don't overlook the problems they announced they were having syncing with the Treos. Maybe things just weren't working out, and they figured, as stated, why devote the effort to a 3rd and minor OS? Why not finish Palm OS II, *then* make it sync with a mini laptop? I always wondered about the timing of the foleo -- release a product for an OS that's just about to be replaced? I saw the announcement of the Foleo as an indication, that Linux was going to be quite a while.

Now... maybe not! That's good news to me.

I'm just very sad for the outside developers who got burned by this.

[dmccunney]

The Foleo was IMHO a good concept, but they had one major flaw in it. The price, for that much money, it needed to be able to do a damned sight more than it did. If they could've kept the price point under $200 to make it work with the Treo like they talked about, it would've probably sold like hotcakes. but at $500-$600, people are going to expect something more than a device that was essentially a bigger screen and keyboard for the Treo.

And this is precisely the issue that Palm has been trying to deal with for years.

The PDA market recapitulated the PC market, only much faster. PCs became commodities, priced accordingly, and all of the major manufacturers have been in a continual struggle to reduce costs as price competition reduced margins.

The PDA did the same thing, going from cool new must have product that Palm and Handspring couldn't make fast enough to something I almost expected to see as a prize in a box of Crackerjacks. Sony exited the market. Handspring struggled and was bought by Palm to get the Treo, which is currently 75% of their revenues and a larger percentage of their profit.

Palm has been floundering to produce something that wasn't a smartphone that would be compelling enough to users that they could sell a lot of them and charge a high enough price to get a decent margin and profit on it. The Foleo, alas, was one more flounder.

If they did price it at $200, they might have sold like hotcakes, but I doubt Palm would have made any money. I haven't seen a teardown on it that estimates what it costs Palm to make them, but more than $200 wouldn't be a surprise.

And exactly right, at $500-$600, it just didn't do enough. The majority of the intended market has laptops. If the Foleo could replace a laptop with a smaller, lighter device, it had a good shot. But if it could, Palm did a good job of not mentioning it.
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Dennis

[Timothy Rapson]

Is there even the slightest possiblility that Palm will take what little is left of it's know-how and make a Sony TH55, ALL the features, REAL quality, NICE looks?

Nah! Too much to ask.

In the case of the Foleo, Asus is smiling big right now. They can go ahead with their plans for higher end models and dropping the $200 loss leader model since their only competition will be the Packard Bell Nanobook and that will be little competion.

[dmccunney]

Sadly, this stikes me as Palm repeating the same pattern they've been stuck in for years now.

Let's make a neat-o new multitasking OS with bits of Be technology! Wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea... (Will we ever find out, definitively, what happened to Cobalt?)

At a guess, it didn't work as intended. Cobalt was supposed to bring a stable, multi-tasking multi-threading kernel to Palm OS, and Palm hired a bunch of developers from the former BeOS effort to work on it. They'd have done better to do what they are doing now and going with an embedded Linux kernel in the first place.

Let's have the hardware and OS developed by separate companies! Wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea...

I don't believe that was Palm's idea to begin with. As I recall, spinning off the OS development as a separate operation was an attempt to placate investors and boost their stock price, which had been under pressure. "Let's take this division, which isn't doing that well, and spin it off as a separate entity, so it doesn't affect the financials of the rest of the company" is a common tactic. Sometimes it even works.

When Sony exited the PDA market, Palmsource was hurting because licensing revenue for PalmOS dropped a lot, and they were put on the block. Palm wanted to buy them back, but got outbid by Access. (Motorola was also rumored to be interested, but apparently not that interested.)

Access Palmsource was eying the smartphone market in Asia, and a chap elsewhere who works for Nokia said they were in talking to his company about their embedded Linux endeavor, ALP. It will be interesting to see if they get anywhere. ALP was originally supposed to make Cobalt the UI layer on top on Linux, but little of Cobalt seems to survive.
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Dennis