Hi Jimmie,

I wanted to make you aware that Palm's CEO Ed Colligan has just made a post to the Palm blog announcing that the company has decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion in its current configuration. The full text of the blog is:

"As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern, flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphones that will take advantage of it.

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 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 deliver 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 of shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on a 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."

You can link directly to the Palm blog and read more at: http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html

This is pretty surprising to say the least. The Foleo was expected to ship some time this month, and was basically finished and even had retail packaging according to some sources. The Foleo was never really embraced the way Palm tried to portray it. Jeff Hawkins described it as being more ground breaking than the Palm Pilot, or the Treo (the world obviously thought otherwise, and Palm finally conceded). I'll give Palm some props for finally realizing that it shouldn't release this device, as their "bread and butter" Treo didn't need such a huge accessory.

Labels: foleo