Palm's Foleo: Measuring the Impact

On Wednesday, mobile device maker Palm demonstrated the fruits of a secret project that one of Palm's founders, Jeff Hawkins, had been working on. Palm's new Foleo is a Linux,- powered, laptop-like device that serves as a companion to smartphones. Analysts and observers have started to weigh in with their opinions, and many are less than raves.

Described by the company as its "first smartphone companion product," the Foleo is designed to work in tandem with a paired smartphone. If a user edits a document on the Foleo, for instance, the changes appear on the accompanying smartphone, and vice versa. Pushing one button provides access to full-screen e-mail, and there are editors for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus the Opera browser for Web surfing and a Palm-developed PDF viewer.

With a 10-inch screen, a full-size keyboard, and battery life of up to five hours, the Foleo mobile companion will work with Palm Treo smartphones, running either Palm OS or Windows Mobile. According to Palm, "most" other smartphones with Windows Mobile should work with the Foleo, and, with a "modest software effort," smartphones using operating systems from Research In Motion, Apple, or Symbian can likewise be supported.

Foleo a Web 2.0 Device?

Despite a few positive initial reactions, many industry observers are pointing out the Foleo's shortcomings. Tom Krazit, writing on CNET News, said that it uses "an underpowered processor that really isn't suited for video," wasn't intended to be a standalone device apart from its smartphone companion, doesn't synchronize calendar appointments, and doesn't yet work with the BlackBerry or a variety of other devices.

While acknowledging that the Foleo had some interesting features, such as instant on and off, Wolfgang Gruener asked on TGDaily whether it was worth $500 "for a large screen and keyboard for your cell phone?"

It can't do much by itself, he wrote, except browse the Web and send or receive e-mails via a Wi-Fi hotspot, and you have to bring it along on your business trips "in addition to your cell phone, your laptop, and your iPod."

There have been a few observers willing to "give the Foleo a chance." One, PC World's Harry McCracken, said that many people could be missing a sea change in the way applications are used. "With more and more applications that once needed to live on a local computer morphing into Web services," he wrote, "a computing device with a decent keyboard and screen, fast Internet access, and a Web browser" could be a new and profitable category.

He added that a "small, thin notebook-like device with good battery life," especially with basic office suite capabilities for working offline on a plane, "would give me most of what I needed to be productive."

Others have cited the use of Linux as a reason for enthusiasm because it provides another device platform for the large open-source community.

Foleo Reality Check

Gartner analyst Todd Kort said he "was pretty surprised" by the Foleo. "I was expecting something smaller, an all-in-one device, maybe a little larger than a Treo," he said.

He said his surprise was coupled with disappointment. "I just don't see much utility in carrying around a 2.5-pound, 10-inch device basically just to do e-mail," he said. "If it had enough utility," he noted, the price wouldn't be a problem. "If you're going to carry around this device, why not just carry a notebook?"

He added that, if the Foleo had been developed as part of a regular development team, the final release product might have been different. "Jeff is regarded almost as a god at Palm," he said. "He is not questioned, and he had his own skunkworks group creating this product without even showing it to most of the people inside Palm."

The Foleo, he said, "didn't get the kind of reality check that would have happened if regular engineers had worked on it." He said that, after the dust settles, Palm might look at releasing a software-only product that builds on the Foleo, to facilitate better connectivity and synchronizing between laptops and smartphones.

Source : news.yahoo.com