Palm hosted four Foleo Sneak Peek events last week. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Manhattan event held at the Rockefeller Center retail store in New York City. What follows are my first impressions of my hands on time with Palm’s latest product offering.

Palm has positioned the Foleo to be an accessory to your mobile phone. When it is launched later this summer, the Foleo will ship with support for the company’s Treo smartphones; however, Palm has expressed interest in expanding support to other mobile phones. (Foleo Fanatics will cover third-party phone support when it is announced. The remainder of this article will deal specifically with the Treo.)

Who and Why

The Foleo is aimed squarely at mobile professionals and executives who spend a lot of time reading and composing email and working with email attachments. When paired with a Treo, email and attachments (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, and images) are displayed on a crisp 10-inch display. Typing up a longer email is easy with Foleo’s full-sized keyboard. For this first Mobile Companion product, the Palm designers have decided to stay focused on the core customer and the applications that are used. When developing the Foleo the designers looked at what applications worked best with a large screen. Email and document editing came to the forefront. The PIM applications work equally as well on the Treo’s screen or the Foleo’s screen and would have less of an impact on the customer experience. Palm is working with their solution partners to ensure Foleo customers will have additional applications to use with the Treo and the Foleo when the product does launch.

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