Thursday, May 31, 2007

Palm sells first Foleo

Note: If you missed Palm's announcement about their new "mobile companion" device line, called Foleo, check out the Flash product intro on Palm's site to orient yourself. To view it, visit this link and click "experience Foleo."

Palm Foleo

I was looking at the Flash demo and still scratching my head a bit before the webcast of Palm's new product announcement when my wife walked into the room. It took her about 15 seconds to figure out that the Foleo is the small personal computer she's been seeking for a few years now. She is not at all a gadget freak. In fact, it was only after I explained to her how the Foleo works that she finally relented and said she now wants a smartphone, too. Hey Palm! She's available if you need someone to do infomercials about this thing!

My wife is a writer of literary fiction and her world is a pad of paper and a word processor. She's also a licensed architect and an artist with a strong aesthetic sensibility. She wants a small, light, elegant computer that will let her work on her writing without tethering her to her desk. You might think that I could have bought her a nice Dell laptop and declared "mission accomplished," but I could never convince her. She's looking for something that's a more personal environment (far away from QuickBooks!) and that is a dedicated tool for writing. And she really wants something that looks attractive and feels good in her hand. I don't know how good the Docs to Go word processor implementation is on the Foleo, but I suspect she'll be just fine with it.

For me the conversation with my wife felt like the Palm Pilot all over again. A simple, low cost device dedicated to doing a few things well becomes a platform for a thousand niche use cases. But wait a minute, I tell myself. As much as Foleo is being touted as a new device, it's obviously a familiar one: it's a personal computer. I've been worrying about how it can possibly stack up against the mature and massive PC industry and survive the inevitable comparisons. But in the meantime there are people out there whose personal computing needs have not been met by PCs and Macs. My wife is one of them. I'm betting there are others.

Palm may be marketing the Foleo as a "mobile companion" (an idea I've been thinking about myself for some time) but it's also the first fresh vision of the personal computer we've seen in many years. That's pretty amazing if you stop to think about it for a moment. I've got a lot more to say about Foleo, but I've got a lot more thinking to do as well, so this will do for now.

Update: 6/1/07 There's an excellent interview of Jeff Hawkins on CNET that gives more insight into the thinking behind this product than I've seen anywhere else yet. Of particular note are his thoughts on how to market new technology product categories and how Foleo gives Palm freedom to fundamentally rethink the Treo. I comment on this, and more broadly on Foleo's prospects in my next post.

Posted by cervezas at 07:36:01. Filed under: Palm Foleo

Comments

David - your wife is obviously a very evolved human. I had much the same reaction she did when I saw Foleo unveiled yesterday and I think the techies will be surprised at the public reaction to this device. It is perfect for people who simply don't need or want the complexities that today's Windows and Mac portable computers present.

It's cheap, simple, handles the tasks most people actually need from a portable device, has great battery life, and turns on in an instant.

Sounds pretty good to me.

Posted by Marc at Thursday, May 31, 2007 07:48:58

"A simple, low cost device dedicated to doing a few things well ... the first fresh vision of the personal computer we've seen in many years"

I see hints of the Zen of Palm in the Foleo. A simple, straightforward interface, quick switching between apps.

The most common complaint seems to be that you can buy a $500 laptop (that weighs 3 times as much) or a 2.5 pound laptop (that costs 3 times as much). But it's still a fragile, complex laptop either way.

Posted by MichaelG at Thursday, May 31, 2007 10:36:23

It is funny that so few people see this.. I want one for myself as I am simply a gadget freak..

But my girlfriend also wants one for web browsing around the house (couch/bed) and for notes at uni. She doesn't care it is not a "Full Laptop", and for me as her tech support and financial backer, I would much prefer she had this.. ;)

Posted by Joel at Thursday, May 31, 2007 18:17:48

I suspect that this idea is waiting for some more pieces to fall into place before it can take off. Google Gears might possibly be the key piece that has just fallen into place.

If Gears works as advertised, and is widely taken up, you will be able to use an online app like Zoho Writer rather than Documents To Go. You can store your archives online, and then work on them online AND offline.

This will make sense of the simplicity/low storage and still leave you writing a novel on the beach.

For me, though, it still needs the PIM applications before it is ready for use. An instant-on, full-size screen could happily replace my Clie TH55 (which has been truly wonderful) but I am not going to carry both round!

Posted by owen at Friday, June 01, 2007 03:24:26

I agree about Google Gears (or equivalent) as a key piece. And it could also be your PIM with offline versions of Google Calendar, the Contacts in Gmail, etc.

Of course, I'd also like my Treo to do the same thing. Maybe a future Linux version will.

Posted by MichaelG at Friday, June 01, 2007 12:02:31

Google Gears is very interesting. I have some question as to whether it would be supported on Opera 9. It's a capable browser and a huge step up for Palm, but Gears doesn't support desktop Opera yet. Opera for ARM Linux may be still another issue. It would be great if this did come about soon and I agree that the timing with the release of Foleo is auspicious.

Gears deals with the biggest obstacle to wireless Internet application usability: the fact that the network has only a "best effort" quality of service means you need a copy of your data locally to have a reliably operable application. But there are other obstacles that relate to integration with the host system, some of which are more critical on a resource constrained device. Like how well does the application respond in low memory or low storage situations. The browser wasn't ever intended to deal with such issues in a really graceful manner because your important data was always living somewhere else at the time. Your browser died the death? So what? It is only a presentation layer. Gears changes that.

Posted by cervezas at Friday, June 01, 2007 18:13:28

Re: Online / Offline Storage: Techies are ripping Palm for not including a hard disk drive on the Foleo. But if you stop to really think about how many letters, spreadsheets and e-mails can be stored in a 4 Gig SD or a portable drive via the USB port the Foleo sports, I bet most of us would never notice -- especially with the Foleo's ability to connect or sync to Web services and the additional memory cards on your Smartphone.

Posted by Mk at Sunday, June 17, 2007 17:41:29

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