Hey, Give Palm's Foleo a Chance!
 |
Everyone's right. But everyone's also engaging in a hasty game of dogpile on the rabbit. One of the burdens of being as visionary as Jeff Hawkins is that folks may assess your new product as a failure simply because its unlikely to be a landmark. Especially when it's sort of the opposite of a PalmPilot or Treo--that is, a product that looks familiar rather than obviously new and different.
I'm not saying I think that Foleo is going to be a monster hit, or even that it'll be more successful than Palm's already-obscure LifeDrive. Asking mobile professionals to buy a device which is sort of like a notebook but not quite is asking a lot; if you divide the world into people who will use both a notebook and a Foleo, those who will use just the Foleo, and those who will use just a notebook, there's no question that most folks will fall into the last group.
But the Foleo doesn't need to represent a PalmPilot-like sea change to be an interesting product that's worth a shot on Palm's part. And those who point to the failure of Microsoft's Jupiter machines and other pseudosubnotebooks are ignoring one salient fact: The technology landscape has changed a heck of a lot in the last few years. In two particular ways.
Way One is a shift that Hawkins talked about at length in his demo: For the first time, a meaningful percentage of highly mobile people are walking around with persistent broadband connections in their pockets. But Way Two is one that I'm not sure is quite on Palm's radar screen: With more and more applications that once needed to live on a local computer morphing into Web services, a computing device with a decent keyboard and screen, fast Internet access, and a Web browser can do things that go far beyond anything those old Jupiter machines were capable of.
So much of my computing life has migrated into Firefox in the last year or so--thanks to services like Google Apps, Yahoo Mail, and Netvibes--that a small, thin notebook-like device with good battery life would give me most of what I needed to be productive. (Especially if it had at least basic office suite capability when offline--like the Foleo's Documents to Go apps--so I could work on a plane sans connectivity.) A big hard drive would be superfluous, since most of my applications, documents, and other data would live in the cloud.
The Foleo isn't quite the Firefox PC I envision--for one thing, it runs Opera, a good browser that some Web-based apps don't support well if at all. The Palm folks conceded onstage that its support for Flash is less than all-encompassing, and I'm not sure if it does Java at all. But it's closer than anything I've seen.
Why not just buy a cheap notebook? Well, if you can find me a $500 laptop that's anywhere near as thin and light as the Foleo, with battery life as long and instant-on capability, I guess I might. But it might still be more computer than I needed much of the time. And it wouldn't be something so unobtrusive that I could almost forget I had with me, which the sleek Foleo might prove to be.
Okay, okay, it's still early to be talking about working entirely via Web services rather than desktop software. But a year from now, it'll be more plausible. A year after that, it might be downright common. And as that happens, I wouldn't be dumbfounded if the Foleo, or Foleo-like devices, found a market.
So unlike naysayers--including our own Ed Albro--I'm willing to give the Foleo a chance. And if PC World snags one to review, I just might try putting my MacBook on the shelf for a spell and seeing how productive I can be with my Treo 750 and a Foleo....
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
I'm one of those people who find Foleo very interesting. It's simple, lightweight and gets me to my blogs and webapps from anywhere I can get a WiFi connection (I'm not a smart phone user). I am a bit concerned about the video issue - I would want to view the short online videos like at YouTube. One other must-have capability - and I'm not sure it won't be able to do that - is to upload photos from my SD card to Flickr. That's the main reason I take a laptop when I travel.
As WiMAX grows, this device will become even more handy.
Here's my theory - mostly because this device by itself makes so little sense. And I don't think Palm can be that dumb to think people would be bowled over by an expensive underpowered laptop wannabe.
My theory?
They wanted to announce that Google Apps would be included on the machine and would synch wirelessly.
However timing of the integration and/or licensing details hung the whole announcement up.
So what we were left with was a very public display of technology that would have wowed us in 1989.
If anyone can bring buzz to a relatively simple concept it would be Google.
Interesting that around the same time as this embarrassing display Google was announcing their applications would soon be available standalone.
Coincidence? Maybe.
This is my theory and I'm sticking to it!
Wayne Schuz
http://www.s-consult.com
For those of us who use our computers just to check e-mail, Outlook, edit work documents, and give PowerPoint presentations, the Foleo is a great solution. I would welcome the opportunity to work with a product that doesn't require constant updating (like Windows) and always has web access. Not having to wait for it to turn on and off is a bonus as well. If the poster above is correct about Google apps, this thing will be killer.
The Palm Foleo looks like the best new product of 2007.
It's absolutely dead on -- and it's the thing I've been searching for the last three years.
It's an OLPA - one laptop per adult -- a truly light, portable machine that does what is needed for 80 percent of tasks -- email and other text based communication.
I want a Foleo -- NOW!
People forget that devices like this existed years ago and were quite popular--they ran Windows CE.
Then Microsoft realized that they were taking market share away from regular, and more expensive, Windows products, and they forbd Windows CE to be used on anything but a handheld (w/o a full screen/normal keyboard), and they effectively killed the market.
Only recently has Linux become mature and user friendly enough to be an option to create a device like this again.
People panning this all have to carry laptops around anyway, so of course they don't see the merit of it.
It reminds me of a talk by Steve Wozniak. He tried three times to sell the PC idea to his employer HP. Each time they told him that their customers didn't want it and that there was no market for it. He said, "They were right. There was no market for it...yet."
The device is the size of a book, has instant on and full screen internet access and WiFi. It's great!
This may be EXACTLY what I need if I understand it correctly.
I have cable wireless at home. I want to sit in my recliner & watch TV while surfing the net to reseach my topic-of-the-moment. I can go to my iMac if I need anything else. I just wanna surf more comfortably. Can this do that? I don't need the email. Have a Treo650, but would only use the Folio w/ it if I wanted to get directions on the fly or check what movies are on. At home- I would want it to use only my cable internet and NOT use my precious limited download mb's on the Treo. Is that how it work? This sounds perfect if it will do what I'm hoping. Can't wait. Can't see spending a couple grand for a laptop just to sit on the couch and surf the net! Let me know if this will do what I'm hoping!!!
Thanks!!!