Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Foleo: when open source is not enough
Palm announced the Foleo mobile companion today. Jeff Hawkins was forced (I believe, he is a myth for me) to present it and say it is "the most exciting device he's worked on" (probably since this morning, but tomorrow will be a different day).Bottom line: yawn... I am not impressed. Jeff must not be impressed himself, since he just sold 15,000 shares of Palm stock ;-)
Ahh, what about the device? It is a sub-notebook with wi-fi and bluetooth (and a keyboard). It has two buttons, one for on/off and the other one to pair with your smartphone, to sync your email.
It is a 600 bucks mobile companion to your 300 bucks smartphone... It weights a heavy 2.5 pounds... It has only 256MB of memory... It runs just for 5 hours (hem, my smartphone runs longer...), and it will drain the battery of your smartphone too via Bluetooth :-)
Any good news? YES! It is Linux. It is mobile open source!!
Does it matter? NO. It is still a useless device that nobody will carry around.
I do not even know where to start, but if the iPhone is going to be a niche and the Nokia 800 is looking for a segment, this is a niche of a niche with no segment. Too expensive, too limited in features, too big (I would need to buy bigger pants to fit it in...).
I cannot believe this is the way out for Palm. I wrote many times that Palm needed open source, but - apparently - it won't be enough.
Hey, I could be wrong. After all, the device is all about synchronization (I am the #1 believer in it). Maybe an enormous community will jump on the Foleo and will make it great. And Palm will make it cheaper, faster, smaller, with more memory and battery life. Or maybe by that time Palm will be called something else...
Posted by Fabrizio at 14:59
2 Comments:
David Beers said...
You're assessment seems to be the popular one among the technorati. I'm getting a pretty different response when I show people the Foleo, though. There are two classes of people who are telling me they are ready to buy right now:
1) Road warriors who really need a laptop only for email, web, Word docs, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint and hate having to pay three times as much or carry three times the weight of a Foleo.
2) People who need simple personal computers. My wife and mother are all over this device. I've been trying to get my wife a laptop because she wanted to be able to work on her writing out on the patio, but I've shown her Dells and MacBooks and she just isn't interested. She doesn't want a PC, she wants a dedicated tool for writing that has a full keyboard, and yeah, maybe lets her surf or grab her email once in a while.
As much of a sync guy as you are, Fabrizio, I'm surprised it didn't occur to you that Palm owning the operating system on both sides of the sync opens up some pretty intriguing opportunities to make sychronization easy and bulletproof out of the box.
I really don't think Hawkins is being forced to express excitement about this. I think he's finally seeing the chance to realize the vision he had from the very beginning: the crazy idea that Palm could be turning mobile computers into peoples' primary computers. Sure, he may fail, but what's more exciting than getting the chance to pursue an almost impossible dream?
Comment Posted at 11:41
Fabrizio said...
Hi David,
I really would like to be able to play with one... Writing just looking at pictures is quite hard ;-)
I do hope you are right and I look forward to playing with one to understand why it could be an awesome device.
It is mobile, open source and all based on synchronization. It is meant to be a device I should love...
fanrozop
