Foleo CANCELLED!!

[Khris]

Palm kills the Foleo dead - Engadget

The Official Palm Blog: A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers

September 04, 2007
A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers

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 smartphone 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 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.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on 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, CEO

[Khris]

Thank god! Maybe Palm does have a few brain cells left!

[brandon]

wow. palm listens to the masses... or maybe the bank account.

[cartogary]

Phew that was close! Foleo would've killed Palm by bleeding what life still exists in the RD dept. and the possibility of a new Treo by years' end. If Palm could make that happen, they could stem the tide of the users abandoning the Treo for HTC, Samsung, Nokia etal.. Make haste Palm! Abandoning the Foleo is your smartest move of the year.

[TazUk]

I still would have liked to have a play with one

[shogunmaster]

TazUk,

Try routing through Palms' dumpsters. I'm sure you can find a number of them considering how close to release date they were.

[eclair]

whew! That was a close one.

[skoenig]

Like TazUK I would at least liked to have a look at it. Who knows if the browser was decent it might have made a nice little thing to have beside the sofa in front of the so I can surf, shop and do TV at the same time.

Ed and Jeff, if you have a few lying around maybe you could send some to us Treonauts to give to the crew and hold a few competitions for?

Come on? What do you say?

It's a brave move but one which I think will ultimately be proven correct. I really would rather you produce a top flight, modern smartphone we can all be proud of, and then top it off (and the competition) with a top flight companion product [that does media please] rather than try to do both now half-assed.

~ Steph

[csward75]

Originally Posted by skoenig

Like TazUK I would at least liked to have a look at it. Who knows if the browser was decent it might have made a nice little thing to have beside the sofa in front of the so I can surf, shop and do TV at the same time.

Ed and Jeff, if you have a few lying around maybe you could send some to us Treonauts to give to the crew and hold a few competitions for?

Come on? What do you say?

~ Steph

Like the idea, I am also with TAZ, would like to have seen one properly, and believe it could have been very useful addition to my treo. Bring on the competition, I wonder how long it will be before they appear on ebay

[TazUk]

I think the concept was good but the software needed to be stronger, tabbed browsing and flash video support are a must these days as is a decent PIM, and the way they were trying to market it wasn't going to help them fly off the shelves. It also needed to be cheaper than the proposed price, being slightly cheaper than an entry level laptop isn't going to help you sell them.

Still as Steph says I'm sure we could find uses for them here at Treonauts