Palm pulls plug on Foleo

Just when Palm was expected to ship the Foleo, its controversial smartphone companion product, the company instead decided to kill it. In a blog posting, Palm CEO Ed Colligan wrote that he decided to cancel the Foleo so the company could focus all its energy on a single product platform. While Palm will continue to offer some products that use Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile software, going forward all its internal work will be on a new software platform due out next year.

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From Colligan’s blog post and Email :

"Because we were nearly at the point of shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on a second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first."