{"id":276,"date":"2007-05-31T11:01:14","date_gmt":"2007-05-31T16:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikew.ca\/wp\/?p=276"},"modified":"2025-01-14T00:18:16","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T00:18:16","slug":"palm-folio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/?p=276","title":{"rendered":"Palm Foleo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>As long as I&#8217;ve been tracking the Palm world, their motto has seemed to me to be &#8220;Do something that&#8217;s (just) good enough.&#8221;. I can remember thinking &#8220;Who would buy this Palm Pilot thing; it&#8217;s so much <em>less<\/em> than a Newton?&#8221;, but people did buy them, and in retrospect it was obvious why: Palm had identified a real need (i.e. find a way to get peoples&#8217; increasingly computer based personal data into something that replaced their filofax) and built it cheaply enough that they could hit a price point that made sense to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since then however, they really haven&#8217;t come up with anything as ground breaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li> Higher-res, color screens? Nice for increased readability, but that&#8217;s about all. Displaying photos on your Palm makes about as much sense as doing it with your iPod. <em>[Does anyone actually do this?]<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Increased storage capability? Sure. If the screens were just a bit bigger they&#8217;d make excellent e-book readers. Nothing else you can do with the space is interesting &#8212; I will <strong>never<\/strong> edit a Word document on my Treo.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Adding a cell phone? Ah, well that <em>was<\/em> actually a good idea, but the phone integration has always seemed like it was frankensteined on to the side of the OS (e.g. take a look at the phone app in the 680). And lets not forget that somebody had to build a separate company (i.e. Handspring) to make it happen. <em>There is nothing that would have prevented Palm from building something to rival the iPhone.<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Adding an HD to the LifeDrive? Bah. They should have fired the person who came up with that one. They put a slow, non-solid state, 4Gig(!) drive (with a duty cycle that needed to be off most of the time or it would die <em>[this was a pdf link that unfortunately is no longer valid.]) <\/em>into something that used to be almost instantly responsive and was supposed to live in your pocket.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Now let&#8217;s be clear about this: Palms don&#8217;t suck. I have had some form of Palm device since the Pilot came out, and I&#8217;m still using a Treo 680. It&#8217;s just that it seems like they&#8217;ve been following that &#8220;just good enough&#8221; mantra too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So here we are, with the announcement of the new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.palm.com\/us\/products\/mobilecompanion\/foleo\/index.html\">Palm Foleo<\/a>, and I just can&#8217;t seem to shake the feeling that this is more of the same. As far as I can tell, it&#8217;s a low spec laptop, that runs some flavour of Linux. It can browse the web and read email, and has some MS Office editing capabilities (but not using OpenOffice <em>[not enough horsepower?]<\/em>). They&#8217;ve got bluetooth sync capability, but it&#8217;s not targetted specifically at Palm phones, so we&#8217;ll have to see how good that can be. The $500 pricepoint is believable, I guess, but it&#8217;s too much for an impulse buy, and for the life of me I can&#8217;t figure out why I wouldn&#8217;t just get a $500 <em>real<\/em> laptop computer instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ah well, as Michael Mace over at <a href=\"http:\/\/mobileopportunity.blogspot.com\/2007\/05\/palm-foleo-its-pc-dummy.html\">Mobile Opportunity<\/a> says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>I think Foleo will eventually live or die based on whether it attracts a lot of third party applications that do interesting things you can&#8217;t do with a notebook PC.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ll just have to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As long as I&#8217;ve been tracking the Palm world, their motto has seemed to me to be &#8220;Do something that&#8217;s (just) good enough.&#8221;. I can remember thinking &#8220;Who would buy this Palm Pilot thing; it&#8217;s so much less than a Newton?&#8221;, but people did buy them, and in retrospect it was obvious why: Palm had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3273,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions\/3273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}