Did Palm Kill the Foleo Too Soon?
Palm’s Jeff Hawkins had introduced some time ago the Palm Foleo a sub-notebook. With the design goal is to complement the Smartphone/PDA, instead of complementing the PC. Due to industry harsh critic for the idea and its price. Palm decided to kill the project subsequently.
The Foleo main features are actually the large screen, full size keyboard and the ability to connect and synchronize with a mobile device.
But, since the beginning of 2008, the paradigm has changed with the wave of ultra portable notebooks that emerge the market such the Asus EeePC, the OLPC, the Apple Macbook Air, the Lenovo X300 and the upcoming HP/Compact 2133, etc.. People seems to adopt more this form factor. People now think that the Foleo is not a dump idea after all. (didn’t I tell you I liked the device?)
So was the Foleo as silly as Hawkins’ harshest critics said? Maybe the execution and timing was off. Or more likely, he was on to something, but wasn’t quite able to take the idea to the next logical conclusion. In fairness to him, he did recognize at the time that the Foleo’s utility may not have been as obvious to the mass consumer as he’d hoped.
“The further out you are, the more people have trouble understanding. It’s hard to go back in time, but when we did the Pilot, there were a lot of people that thought that was a stupid idea. I mean a lot,” Said Hawkins.
[Read the full article at Crave]
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