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back to article Palm 'innovative Wi-FI device' invite points to Foleo revamp?

Is Palm about to put its once-canned Foleo notebook-alternative back on the agenda? That's one possible conclusion to draw from a claim the company's currently seeking testers for an "innovative new product". The invitation, sent out to a number of customers in the US, states that successful candidates must be heavy smartphone …

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  1. Jered Floyd

    Not a Foleo, probably a VOIP phone

    First, I'm pretty confident it's not a Foleo. Besides the product being, er, uncompelling, the division developing the Foleo was closed and all the employees laid off. (I know this because I've hired some of those developers -- it was a team split between Massachusetts and California.)

    Second, the fact you have to be a Sprint customer says to me that it's probably another VOIP-at-home program, such as T-mobile is already offering. Yawn.

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  2. andy gibson
    Thumb Up

    Hope it returns

    As a long time Palm and Psion organiser owner (and just about every other portable made in the 80s and 90s, it would be good to see a return of the companies who were *the* names for portable devices. I'd like to see a 2008 version of the Psion 5mx, probably one of the best portables i've ever used.

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  3. Mark Daniels
    Thumb Up

    @ Andy Gibson

    5mx ?

    Probably the best portable ?

    Give me a break.

    C E R T A I N L Y the best portable ever.

    No arguement. End of story.

    The only thing stopping me buying one is the small 4gb memory.

    If it is is to be truly 5mx replacement [yes, I still use mine] it needs to have a 20gb [or more] hard drive. Lets face it, my nokia e95 has a 2gb micro sd card.

    P.

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  4. Edward Green

    Zen?

    I would love to see a Palm return to form. The fact remains that the Palm Dragonball devices (up to the m515) are still quicker for switching applications and using PIM functions than any modern smartphone I have used. Palm has lost its Zen sadly.

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  5. Charlie van Becelaere
    Paris Hilton

    "The sub-laptop the could have beaten the Eee"

    Could have beaten the Eee? They didn't have a chance, not least because of the photos apparently available for stories on El Reg. No one would have noticed.

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  6. John F
    Unhappy

    A little iffy, the reg said

    I like the way "pundits" are quoted as being negative on the Foleo - the reg itself seems to have called it "a little iffy". And yet, it probably was ahead of its time and the price presumably would have come down, as it has with every other Palm device. But the real blame as usual lies with Palm - who have done OK, but with the iPhone and iPod Touch now seeming so incredibly similar to their phones and the Palms that they launched so long ago, have to go down as one of the worst serial missers of opportunities ever to grace the computer industry.

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  7. moylan
    Alien

    @andy gibson

    agreed. i loved the psion 5mx, used it at my main computer for 3 years. preferred the keyboard on the psion 3a mind you.

    if they had of released the foleo i would have bought it instead of an eee pc as i seem to remember that it had a much better battery life.

    hope they do release it. just can't decide if it should run palm os or linux. both would have their advantages. palm os as it has tons of useful apps or linux as it has tons of apps and development tools like python.

    of course the last 2 palm devices i bought the palm m125 and the palm e both had hardware problems so i hope their hardware standards have improved.

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  8. Nick Woodson

    Now I'm depressed....

    I was looking forward to ditching me E2 in favor of something with a little more kick.....and they let me down. Now they need to un-ass the plans and get a product to market. While they're at it they need to abandon PalmOS and fix a linux distro that will run FOSS apps.

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  9. andrew mulcock

    Psion netbook et all

    Once again , a great UK invention to early and not carried through.

    Psion, yep they had the net book, but I'm certain that way before that, before the Psion 3 series, they had a notebook, totaly none standard, but GUI based,

    and naturally not cheap, but I can't find a link to one.

    Anyone know what the ** I'm talking about, and can find a link, please.

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  10. Sean Nevin

    eee Beater

    The Foleo was what I intended to get when I first received an email about it from Palm. Then I read (on the Reg no less) that the Foleo was scrapped before it even came out.

    Then the eeePC came out. Since I still wanted a tiny laptop-like thing for extreme portability, I got myself an eee.

    However, while I do love the eee, if it and the Foleo had existed at the same time, I would have chosen the latter, even if it cost an extra $100, as I've always been very impressed with palm stuff. I have a Treo600 that I got about 4 years ago and aside from one little incident involving a coin and the charging slot, it has never been turned off or reset; and it's never let me down.

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  11. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

    @Mark

    "The only thing stopping me buying one is the small 4gb memory."

    You lucky sod. The rest of us were stuck with the 4MB and 8MB models ;-)

    After (mostly) gathering dust for five years, my 5MX still does me good service. There's room for it in the coat pocket (next to the iPhone and 6300i) these days. I wrote the Nokia CWM article on it last week, spellchecked it on the Tube, and beamed it over as soon as I got back to the office (thank you John Montgomery). Voila.

    (And again I cursed Psion for not producing a 5MX with an embedded GPRS SIM before they bailed...)

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  12. Matthew Weigel

    The Foleo Would Have Missed

    It may seem like a small thing, but they had the targeting completely off for the Foleo. A companion to your Treo? I don't - and won't, thanks to the iPhone - own a Treo, and I don't want my laptop to be tethered in any way to my phone unless I'm out in the middle of nowhere and need to use the phone as a modem.

    Sure, it would have been a nice Linux laptop, and in that regard could serve as well as the EeePC, but it wouldn't have served users like my wife (who now enjoys surfing from the couch on her EeePC) nearly as well. Custom web browser, email that you have to download from your Treo, non-x86 processor that can't run the Linux Flash plugin...

    They got very close in specs, but they screwed it up a bit and they positioned it wrong. The EeePC is a minor iteration on their idea, but it's the iteration where things came together. Now the EeePC alone is practically a new class of laptop (even though machines like it have been with us for a long time, often imported from Japan), and the Foleo never could have had that kind of impact.

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  13. moylan
    Alien

    @andrew mulcock

    http://www.bioeddie.co.uk/models/psion600MC.htm

    the psion mc200, mc400, mc500 and mc600 were laptops that ran a proprietry os. think of them as a big primitive psion 5. always wanted to buy one but never had the cash.

    the cheap one mc200 was £600 up to the £1300 mc600 version.

    the psions were so far ahead of their time that only now is nokias symbian starting to catch up.

    if i could bring only one feature of psion it would be the opl programming language.

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  14. MegaZone

    It is the Palm Treo 800w

    It's the Palm Treo 800w, bet on it.

    When the Foleo 1 was killed Palm said they might revisit it *AFTER* Palm OS 2 is out, and if and when they did Foleo 2 it would run Palm OS 2 (their Linux-based OS). Since the OS isn't done, let alone out, it isn't a new Foleo.

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  15. Nick Palmer

    I'm with...

    ...Matthew Weigel, above, even if he IS an iPhone user (kidding, OK?); better battery life, perhaps, but critically flawed by being tied to a phone, not being able to run standard versions of apps (or standard plugins in their own customised versions of apps)... All in all, this thing was more akin to an expansion keyboard for a phone with a larger screen bolted on. I could have pretty much the same thing going with a £25 bluetooth keyboard for my phone (I could live without the display). The Eee's an actual standalone usable laptop that can run anything any normal bog-stock PC can, do it in an incredibly small form factor and at incredibly low cost, whilst being highly resilient. Folio didn't even come close.

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