Palm Unexpectedly Cancels the Foleo

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, has posted on the company's Blog that they are canceling the Foleo, originally announced on May 30, 2007. The Foleo is a smartphone companion product that was to have a large screen and full-size keyboard to view and edit email and office documents residing on a smartphone. The Foleo was be launched this summer for about $500.
According the Palm's Blog:

"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.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first."

Palm Unexpectedly Cancels the Foleo

Comments

Post a comment