Palm Foleo, it’s not a smartphone, not yet a laptop.

Scott sent me a link to this InfoWorld piece about their hands on with a Foleo. Like Britney was, the Foleo seems to be at an awkward transitional space and it doesn’t seem to know what to do. It’s grown up past being a smartphone, it’s bigger with a sexy full width keyboard and big screen. But it can’t do all the things a laptop can do, yet. It’s application list is small and it remains to be seen whether or not Palm will be able to woo in the sizeable developer base necessary to make it a success. It could be chicken and egg’y since it can’t be a success without the developers but why would developers move over to it without it already having a big user base? Britney’s producers know it, Steve Jobs knows it, you have to make it sexy.

For my money, given what I know about it, I think that it is either a few hundred dollars to expensive - if it was $300 it’d be much easier to see people just picking one up. As it is, $600 is still enough money to prevent most casual buyers. See how expensive the X-Box and how a price drop jumped up it’s sell rate. Alternately, at 2.5 pounds, it’s small, but I can still get laptops lighter than it, sure more expensive, but potentially lighter as well and obviously more full featured. If it clocked in at 1.5 pounds, that’d be something new and not otherwise attainable in the laptop world.

I mean who knows, it isn’t all about a spec sheet. The iPhone proved that. It’s about the user experience and how people use it. If it is awesome enough, people will put up with its quirks to bask in its strengths. But as far as I know this is the first real hands on review I’ve seen and it pretty much confirms what I believe most of the internet thought of the device based on the little marketing we’ve seen thus far. It doesn’t seem as though, despite Hawkins’ protestations, that the interface and the device itself are compelling enough on their own. Palm’s got it’s work cut out, all I know is I’m not buying any stock in anticipation of this device’s release. I wonder how many hardware man hours this took out of Palm’s life and what those man hours might have meant for the Treo line if the Foleo was not created. Imagine what the 700P could have been instead of the fiasco it was. If only…

UPDATE: Ok, well.. update from between the time I wrote this and the time I’m posting it…. two things have come out that support this thing. A new video with Ben Combee talking about and showing off the Foleo. It’s a pretty good video, Ben’s obviously digging the video and on PIC he’s winning converts. Personally, I remain skeptical, but this is certainly the right direction for Palm marketing to go in. Keep it up.

Predictably, neither of these are showing up on Palm’s blog. Here’s my guess, the video shows up (maybe) with a graf or two of really boring text. The 700 fiasco shows up with some apologist blathering, nothing meaningful to be immediately followed by a long post about nothing. It is just possible that they could post the 700 update post and follow it up with a nice long post including the above video, but I don’t think they have it in them.

Aug 13th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: palm