Is Foleo Palm's folly?

Searching for a new hit

One way Palm and its carrier partners could create interest in the Foleo would be by bundling a Treo, a Foleo, some storage cards and an unlimited data plan, Bhavnani said. At around US$799 or US$899, that might attract some customers who have been sitting on the sidelines of the smart-phone scene, and that's an awful lot of people.

The real money, however, comes from the corporate users. Palm fought uphill for many years trying to get the Treo devices inside of corporate IT departments, finally agreeing to run Windows Mobile on the Treo to stimulate interest.

It's far from clear why corporations would want to give their mobile workers a Foleo, given that it would require the few vital corporate applications that could even be stored on a Foleo to be rewritten for Linux and that the device doesn't work with GoodLink or BlackBerry, Bhavnani said.

Hawkins did not reveal many details about Foleo's specifications. Representatives for Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and mobile processor powerhouse ARM were unable to immediately confirm whether Palm was using one of their products.

The product uses flash memory, but it's not clear how much will be dedicated to system memory versus storage. A Palm representative said specifications would be released this summer closer to when the product would be available.

After the success of the Treo, Palm has been searching for a new hit as it fends off rumors that it might be sold to a larger vendor or a private equity firm. Given that, it might have made more sense for the company to come up with a new design for the Treo, or software that lets Treos work more closely with existing laptops, rather than striking out on an uncertain path, Kort said.

Palm's faithful--who have stuck by the company through years of languishing development of the Palm OS--appeared underwhelmed at the announcement of Foleo, according to comments on the PalmInfoCenter blog.

"This reminds me a bit of the first wave of WinCE based laptops in the late '90s that touted instant on and fast access to applications. Or it reminds me, you know, of laptops," wrote poster "Nybble" on PalmInfocenter. Negative sentiment outnumbered positive thoughts by a wide margin on the blog.