Palm Foleo

As long as I’ve been tracking the Palm world, their motto has seemed to me to be “Do something that’s (just) good enough.”. I can remember thinking “Who would buy this Palm Pilot thing; it’s so much less than a Newton?”, 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’ 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.

Since then however, they really haven’t come up with anything as ground breaking.

• Higher-res, color screens? Nice for increased readability, but that’s about all. Displaying photos on your Palm makes about as much sense as doing it with your iPod. [Does anyone actually do this?]
• Increased storage capability? Sure. If the screens were just a bit bigger they’d make excellent e-book readers. Nothing else you can do with the space is interesting — I will never edit a Word document on my Treo.
• Adding a cell phone? Ah, well that was 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. There is nothing that would have prevented Palm from building something to rival the iPhone.
• 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 [pdf link — see section “Hard Drive”]) into something that used to be almost instantly responsive and was supposed to live in your pocket.

Now let’s be clear about this: Palms don’t suck. I have had some form of Palm device since the Pilot came out, and I’m still using a Treo 680. It’s just that it seems like they’ve been following that “just good enough” mantra too long.

So here we are, with the announcement of the new Palm Foleo, and I just can’t seem to shake the feeling that this is more of the same. As far as I can tell, it’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 [not enough horsepower?]). They’ve got bluetooth sync capability, but it’s not targetted specifically at Palm phones, so we’ll have to see how good that can be. The $500 pricepoint is believable, I guess, but it’s too much for an impulse buy, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why I wouldn’t just get a $500 real laptop computer instead.

Ah well, as Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity says:

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’t do with a notebook PC.

We’ll just have to see.