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Fuzzy Logic It’s real: Palm’s mystery device IS the Foleo!
Fuzzy Logic It’s real: Palm’s mystery device IS the Foleo! | It’s real: Palm’s mystery device IS the Foleo! |
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| Written by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 31 May 2007 | |
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Dubbed the Foleo, it’s variously dubbed as a “smartphone companion product” and “mobile companion” and is the brainchild of Palm founder and Palm Pilot inventor, Jeff Hawkins, with full details, images and more now available at the Palm website. Armed with a 10-inch LCD screen, one-button access to full-screen email, instant on, instant off, rapid access to various applications, a full-size QWERTY keyboard, web search and browsing via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi using the Opera browser, built-in editors for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus a PDF viewer, a compact, stylish design that fits on an airline tray table, a light weight of only 2.5 pounds, featuring fast, simple and intuitive navigation, offering a 5-hour battery life and running the Linux OS for “easy application development”, the Foleo certainly sounds compelling. Unfortunately, the Folio has no built-in wireless modem, but instead either relies on Wi-Fi signals or expects you to connect the Folio via Bluetooth to your mobile cell phone, using the phone as the wireless modem instead. At present Treo Palms running the Palm or Windows Mobile OS are immediately compatible, other Windows Mobile OS devices should work with ‘little or no modification’ and compatibility with other cell phones from Blackberry, Nokia, Apple and others is currently being worked on, requiring only a ‘modest software effort’. Designed to let you easily view and edit email and office documents residing on a smartphone, Palm says that “edits made on Foleo automatically are reflected on its paired smartphone and vice versa. Foleo and its paired smartphone stay synchronized throughout the day or at the touch of a button. This powerful combination is for productivity-minded business people who want a more complete mobile solution for email, attachments and access to the web.” Jeff Hawkins said that “Foleo is the most exciting product I have ever worked on. Smartphones will be the most prevalent personal computers on the planet, ultimately able to do everything that desktop computers can do. However, there are times when people need a large screen and full-size keyboard. As smartphones get smaller, this need increases. The Foleo completes the picture, creating a mobile-computing system that sets a new standard in simplicity.” Palm’s CEO and President Ed Colligan said “As we did with the PalmPilot more than a decade ago, and more recently with the Treo smartphone, Palm is driving innovation and capitalizing on emerging opportunities in mobile computing, a market full of potential. The Palm Foleo represents our first product in a new line of solutions that will redefine how people work while away from their desks. It starts today with a focus on wireless email, and we expect the Foleo to grow in features and expand its capabilities as the platform grows.” Palm’s statement also reminds us that the Foleo is a powerful computer in its own right, can have programs written for it as it uses the open Linux OS, and has a USB port, video-out port, headphone jack, as both SD and CF memory card slots. The Foleo will retail for US $499.{moscomment}
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