Palm cancel Foleo mobile companion
Got an email from Ed Colligan, President and CEO of Palm. (OK, I was just kidding. He didn't specially email to me. I subscribed to Palm's newsletter)
It is sad that Palm decided to cancel Foleo. When I first saw Foleo, I thought that it is a great product and has lots of potential. It is sad to see Palm canceling Foleo. Not many people agrees with Palm's idea of how mobile computing should be in the future. Foleo didn't get much good comments. Even the guys at Engadget feels that Palm shouldn't be doing Foleo.
I don't know. Somehow, I feel that Foleo is the way future mobile computing should be. OK, maybe it need more enhancement. But I really feel that the future should be where your mobile phone remain in your pocket, and a large screen device is being used to access the data.
Perhaps the time is not right yet for Foleo.
The good news is, Palm is concentrating on its OS now. Which I think is also very important. It's been a long time since Palm upgrades its OS. There is really alot to catch up. Lets hope it is not too late to make a come back.
PS: Just wondering, if they are about to start shipping Foleo, does that means that they have one warehouse full of Foleo? What is palm going to do with it? Will they be giving it out to loyal palm supporters?
Ed, I'm a loyal palm supporter. If you giving Foleo out, do let me know. I don't mind self collect too. :D
As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern, flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphones that will take advantage of it.
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 our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to deliver products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.
Because we were nearly at the point of shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on a second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.
Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.
I would like to thank our customers for their interest in Foleo. I know there will be disappointed folks who were looking forward to carrying a Foleo for all their mobile computing needs. I am certainly one of them. I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution. We will make every effort to make sure we bring our developers forward to our next generation platform.
This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.
Ed Colligan
President & CEO
Palm, Inc.
It is sad that Palm decided to cancel Foleo. When I first saw Foleo, I thought that it is a great product and has lots of potential. It is sad to see Palm canceling Foleo. Not many people agrees with Palm's idea of how mobile computing should be in the future. Foleo didn't get much good comments. Even the guys at Engadget feels that Palm shouldn't be doing Foleo.
I don't know. Somehow, I feel that Foleo is the way future mobile computing should be. OK, maybe it need more enhancement. But I really feel that the future should be where your mobile phone remain in your pocket, and a large screen device is being used to access the data.
Perhaps the time is not right yet for Foleo.
The good news is, Palm is concentrating on its OS now. Which I think is also very important. It's been a long time since Palm upgrades its OS. There is really alot to catch up. Lets hope it is not too late to make a come back.
PS: Just wondering, if they are about to start shipping Foleo, does that means that they have one warehouse full of Foleo? What is palm going to do with it? Will they be giving it out to loyal palm supporters?
Ed, I'm a loyal palm supporter. If you giving Foleo out, do let me know. I don't mind self collect too. :D
