Ok, get ready to hit me but I have to say that Palm, Palmsource have really lost what made their success in the end of the nineties.
A bit of background: I’ve been a Pilot user (remember?) since 95 or 96. At this time I abandonned for ever any paper agenda or phonebook. Since then I’ve used Palm devices until 2003 (if I remember well). For those that don’t know me this means I’ve had around a dozen of these beasts, finishing with the memorable Treo 600.Well, anyway, enough of me, now on the Fooleo, oops, the Foleo, from Palm, I’m more than pissed of that what I consider the best mobile platform (Palm OS) with the best brand (Palm), has just f*cked up this much!
So here it begins:

  • Making big, bulky, technically outdated, hardware
  • Keeping an antenna this long (really ridiculous)
  • Failing to licence its OS to big players massively
  • No wifi on the most recent pdaphones
  • 0,3 MPx…
  • And now the Fooleo

So the Foleo is a big fat pda with a keyboard, that only lasts 5 hours (latest sony subnotebooks hold a 7 to 8 hours). It works on a (certainly closed) Linux flavor (no Palm OS, no Windows (or even Mac OS ;)) and Syncs with your smartphone… Wow, what a feature!
Ok, it has one asset: $500 only. Not sure this will be enough becaus franckly, who will carry a sub notebook that is not a notebook, a big pdaphone that is not a phone…

Palm and Palmsource (now Access) have really lost completely a battle they could have played a significant role in.
Instead of making this kind of devices, concentrate on the core products:

Make a modern Treo, slim, full featured (hint: have a look at the Samsung SGH-i600, or HTC S620 (I have and really enjoy both), put a rock solid version of Palm OS on it and you will get the market share you deserve!

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