Palm Folds Foleo

I'm not at all surprised to hear that Palm is folding up their tent, and can canceling the Foleo. This product didn't make sense to me at the time. When it was announced, I put my nickel down, and had this to say about it:

Palm needs to get back to what it does best- making a really good handheld. If it can't easily fit into my pocket, and I need to carry it in a separate bag, than I'd rather just bring my notebook along for the trip. Sure, one day the notebook may evolve, dumping its hard drive for flash memory, and becoming lighter and more reliable. As the Foleo is being positioned as a smartphone accessory, and most users have regular cell phones and not smartphones, I think they went for a niche that is just too narrow.

One of the fun parts of commenting, and ultimately trying to predict the next trend, is going back, and seeing how close we are to what really happened. In this case, I was awfully close. Here it is, right from the Palm CEO's mouth:

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.

He also goes on to say:

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.

Seriously, I could have saved the Palm folks around $10 million buckaroos that they wasted on this Foleo project.

Palm defined, and popularized what a handheld could do. Their move into smartphones was a natural progression of their business. They've made some bad decisions, like putting a hard drive into the Palm (Lifedrive) when flash memory was becoming affordable in larger capacities. Still, the iPhone may have stimulated the smartphone category, but it can clearly be improved upon. Palm needs to focus on their core business, and not be distracted by their side projects like the Foleo. We all look forward to new products in this market segment, and a return to Palm innovating, and expanding their product line.

--Jonas

PS: I'm looking forward to the iPod "dog & pony" show tomorrow, and expect some commentary.