Foleo - We hardly got to know you …
… and now I guess we won’t! Sadly, for some, the Folio will not be that lightweight, elegant and thoughtfully designed mobile companion to assist you in all those things that you like to do as you Experience Mobility. Today, Palm decided to put the Folio to rest and move onto other areas.
For others, they won’t be so sad. Since its announcement there has been a huge amount of negative press about this device. It just did not grab the public the way Palm thought it would. Evidently the ability to press a button and have the device instantly on was not enough nor was the fact to press another button and have it instantly connect wirelessly to your smartphone. I guess the ability to view and edit Office documents and use it to make presentations with up to five hours of battery life was not even enough to entice you to leave your laptop at home.
The appeal for a device comes from many fronts. Looks, functionality, and not surprisingly how the initial hype is generated from the press. It seems as if that initial negative press was enough to to place this device in the “hold” bin and force Palm to make the decision to move on. One can only wonder what effect this will ultimately have on Palm.
Is it a mistake? It really depends on who you talk to. I have had two friends use the device and both liked it a lot. In fact, one has used everyday for the past few months and indicated this morning that he will not leave home without it. So did it have it all? No! But what we were seeing was a continual increase in supported software that would have made the Folio experience a good one. For me, I was looking forward to it. Why? Virtually everyday I use the Nokia N800 to check my mail and surf the web when I am away from my PC. It is easy, reasonably fast and truly convenient. The thought of having a Folio with a larger screen and a really usable keyboard to use any where, any time was very appealing.
The following is a message from Ed Colligan:
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
Written by Jack Cook · Filed Under Palm
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