1999 Called. It Wants Its Vadem Clio Back. Sharp Mobilon Pro, Too.
by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 4, 2007 at 5:22 PM PT
I think it’s probably the most disappointing product I’ve seen in several years. To think that anyone would carry something with a 10-inch display at 2.5 pounds as an adjunct to a phone just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Maybe the Foleo wasn’t Palm founder Jeff Hawkins’s “best idea ever.” This afternoon Palm said it is scrapping the Clio-esque “mobile companion” that it launched with great fanfare in late May. “In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts,” Palm CEO Ed Colligan wrote in a post to Palm’s blog. “To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next-generation platform and the first smart phones that will bring this platform to market.”
An astonishing turn of events, really. The $499 device was scheduled to ship in summer 2007. And Palm was insisting it was on track to do so as recently as Aug. 24. Apparently, the company decided it was better off taking a $10 million charge to earnings for canceling the Foleo than launching it in a market that has questioned its viability since the day it was announced. “I think Palm was wise enough to pull back when all the signs were indicating negative,” analyst Kort told IDG. “If they would have poured a lot of resources into this and failed, it could have dragged the company down pretty quickly.”
