Late last May, Palm announced the Foleo, a mobile companion to the Treo and other Palm handheld products. However elegant and with large screen and full-size keyboard, this nonstand-alone device is practically useless without any accompanying handheld.
Palm CEO Ed Colligan realized that and has announced it has discontinued the product despite its nearing release to the public:
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 our 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.
For a companion device priced at $499 (after a $100 rebate), it will be a hard sell although a few people were enthusiastic about it. Still, I believe it’s a good move to fold it up until they’ve finally figured out how to go about it. Hopefully, lessons will be learned and the Foleo II (or whatever they’ll call it later) will be much better.
