Palm nixes the Foleo
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(InfoWorld) - 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's Windows Mobile software, going forward, all its internal work will be on a new software platform due out next year. Just over a week ago, on Aug. 24,Â Palm denied reports that the launch of the Foleo would be delayed. Palm first introduced the product in May, saying it would ship in the summer. The Foleo was a Linux-based lightweight PC that would operate in conjunction with the Treo smartphone. But because the Foleo had little processing power, it wouldn't add much more than a larger keyboard and screen, so it could hardly justify the proposed $500 price tag, said Todd Kort, an industry analyst. Palm still believes a product like the Foleo could work and plans to build a "Foleo II" based on Palm's upcoming software, Colligan wrote. He wouldn't speculate on when that second-generation product would ship. "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 cannot afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus," he wrote. Criticism and lack of market interest may have contributed to Palm's decision to kill the product, Kort said. "There was very little interest in it from the public," he said. Palm also may have stumbled in generating interest from the developer community, he said. Developers don't want to work on products for a platform unless it's likely to be successful, and the negative response to the Foleo may have kept many developers away, he said. "I think Palm was wise enough to pull back when all the signs were indicating negative," he said. Palm isn't in the position to take a big risk on a new product category. While the company is still profitable, its sales have slowed considerably as it moves from being a PDAÂ maker to a smartphone developer. Palm's profit for the quarter ending June 1 reflected a 44 percent drop from the same quarter last year. "If they would have poured a lot of resources into this and failed, it could have dragged the company down pretty quickly," Kort said. Palm will take an earnings charge of less than $10 million related to the cancellation, Colligan said in the blog post.
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The PalmSource chief financial officer jumps ship. Does that mean it's sinking?
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(InfoWorld) - Struggling handheld device maker Palm has been hit with layoffs. The layoffs, which occurred Thursday, affected "a small percentage" of Palm's approximately 1,200 employees and were concentrated in the company's development group, according to a company spokesman. They primarily affect Palm employees in the U.S., he added. Palm has seen steady decline in the handheld device market, where it leads the market and is in the midst of financial restructuring. Last week,Â private equity investors Elevation Partners took a 25 percent stake in Palm, investing $325 million into the struggling smartphone maker. The company faces stiff competition in the growing smartphone market, where its Treo line has been a hit. Also, its latest hardware release, theÂ Foleo 'smartphone companion,'Â has garned only a lukewarm response thus far. The Palm spokesman said that the reorganization was in the works prior to the Elevation investment and that the company is still hiring staff in other areas. "We're flattening our organizational hierarchy and doing some realignment," he said. He would not say exactly how many employees were being laid off.
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Palm Inc.'s death knell has been rung over and over &#151; on Wall Street, in headlines, and by a growing number of discontented fans.
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Intrigued by Palm's new "smartphone companion" but not ready to bet on an unproven and probably doomed Linux-based ultra-compact computer? We've got seven attractive options for you.
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PalmSource has introduced Palm OS Cobalt 6.1, an enhanced version of Palm OS Cobalt. Designed to accelerate the development of next-generation Palm Powered smartphones and wireless devices, Palm OS Cobalt
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18 years before Palm's Foleo... Forgotten Tech There's nothing new under the sun, some folk say, and that's certainly true of Palm's recently announced Foleo. It's the palmtop reborn in a slightly sexier, slightly larger form. Even its name is reminiscent of that bygone arena - it's rather like the Atari Portfolio, the world's first palmtop PC, released in June 1989.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - AfterÂ canceling its controversial FoleoÂ product and continuing to struggle with a shift away from the personal digital assistant market, Palm warned on Wednesday that its upcoming earnings report could be weaker than expected. For the quarter ending Aug. 31, Palm will lose $0.01 per share or break even, the company said. Earlier, the company had said it expected a loss of $0.01 or a gain of $0.01 in the period. That compares with a gain of $0.35 per share in the same quarter last year. Palm also narrowed its revenue forecast to between $359 million and $361 million, instead of the previously expected $355 million to $365 million. Palm will release its quarterly earnings report on Oct. 1. The company is facing challenges as it changes its business from one focused on PDAs to one that specializes in smart phones. Earlier this month, Palm announced it wouldn't ship the Foleo, a companion product to itsÂ Treo smart phone, as planned. When the device was announced, analysts said it would be too expensive and wouldn't offer valuable features. Palm said it decided to focus instead on its own software platform that is due out in 2008 or 2009.
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Aimed as a 'companion' for its smartphones but essentially a computer on its own, Palm introduced the Foleo, a Linux-powered laptop-like device.
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Palm CEO Ed Colligan made the right decision to dump the Foleo. But how will Jeff Hawkins and Palm bounce back from the admission that they badly misjudged the market for a weak laptop?
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A consistent theme among many people in PDA forums around the Internet lately has been that Palm OS based PDAs are not making the effort to cater to the need for more useful features (for example, there is only one current PDA model that includes Wifi
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Palmsource has introduced a new version of Cobalt, its software platform for smartphones. The new smartphone OS includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support and an enhanced Web browser.
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Handheld-computer maker PalmOne is considering moves that would take it beyond the operating system that helped make the company a household name.
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CNET reports that PalmOne has evaluated versions of Microsofts Windows Mobile as well as Linux-based operating systems for use in its products.
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PalmOne leads in the US - Nokia everywhere else
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Rumours of our death are in no way ex... Comment Last week we ran an article covering the launch of a new Palm OS emulation environment, and commented that development for Palm OS was grinding to a halt and the platform would soon be forgotten.â¦
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By John Markoff  Fifteen years after pioneering personal computers that nestled comfortably in a user's hand, Palm has announced plans to sell a two- handed laptop-size machine called the Foleo.