Palm Foleo Ditched

I'm not going to bother writing a lot about this and let the email that I received speak for it's self. I received this email because I registered on the Palm website to receive email updates about the Foleo. All I can say is wow!

As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern, flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphones that will take advantage of it.

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. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to deliver products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

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.

I would like to thank our customers for their interest in Foleo. I know there will be disappointed folks who were looking forward to carrying a Foleo for all their mobile computing needs. I am certainly one of them. I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution. We will make every effort to make sure we bring our developers forward to our next generation platform.

This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.

Ed Colligan
President & CEO
Palm, Inc.

New Samsung F700

Gizmodo has a post about the Samsung F700 picked up from Tech Digest. New pictures of the device are available from PMP Today as well as the new name of the device, Newly christened Samsung Croix, it has a four-directional touch input, which explains why it’s called “Croix.” Tech Digest did a story about this phone back on February 8, 2007. I really hope this device is headed to the states via Sprint.

gPhone Update

As more and more news services write articles about the possibility of a Google Phone it seems the details just get repeated over and over. There is little new in the stories I have links to below, but worthy of a quick scan. In the "Five Facts..." article there is reference to two different posts by Simeon Simeonov from the Open Gardens blog that are really interesting reads, so I added unique links to these two posts below. Kudos to engadget for the post with quotes and links to the articles below.

“The Ideal Mobile Software Stack” by Simeon Simeonov, February 19, 2007.

“The Real Google Phone” By Simeon Simeonov, March 7, 2007

Boston Globe "Introducing the Google Phone" by Scott Kirsner

"Five Facts About Google Phone" written by Om Malik

Sprint Sees Growth Beyond Cell Phones

There's another good article by Peter Svensson an AP Technology Writer about the Sprint 4G/Wi-MAX/Xohm effort. The stock market analysts are almost all taking a wait and see attitude towards this new technology and network roll out of Sprint's. I'm also a "believe when I see" type of person, but I can't pretended that the idea of the network isn't exciting. Read the article on Yahoo.

gPhone

I was hoping that more info would come out about the supposed gPhone that CrunchGear wrote about earlier this week CG Exclusive: HTC Insider Confirms Existence of the Google Phone
but I have not seen any new information about this so here are my thoughts....
As previously reported the new gPhone is really a device made to Google specs utilizing a Google OS. What has not been discussed is what carriers will allow this new device on their networks? What carriers have any type of public partnership or affiliation to Google? I seem to recall a little announcement by Sprint that Google is partnering on the Xohm effort. At the time of the Google/Sprint press release I really didn't understand where they were going with this partnership, but now it's more clear. It's my opinion that this new device sporting the Google OS will be utilizing the Xohm network. What I'm not clear on is the supposed use of VoIP from the device, and if Sprint is going to allow Xohm devices to utilize VoIP instead of utilizing the Sprint wireless (CDMA) voice network. If the Xohm devices are allowed to utilize VoIP then I think we are seeing an evolution of the wireless industry and Xohm really could be as revolutionary as Sprint is saying it will be. Q4 2007 and 2008 should be a lot of fun to see how Xohm and the gPhone are accepted and utilized.

UPDATED!
Check out this article from InfoWeek
Sprint press release announcing the Google Collaboration
Here's an exerpt from the Sprint press release:
"Sprint network bandwidth, location detection and presence capabilities will be matched with Google's popular communications suite - Google Apps™ - that combines the Gmail™, Google Calendar™ and Google Talk™ services. Customers will be able to experience a new form of interactive communications, high speed Internet browsing, local and location-centric services, and multimedia services including music, video, TV and on-demand products."

Another 4G UMPC

Raon Digital has announced a new WiBro device for Korea and it makes me wonder if devices like this will be successful in the U.S. when Sprint has completed their XOHM roll out? UMPC devices really facinate me, because I'm not sure the right design has been demonstrated yet and the other question I have is who do you market it to? Is it the business traveler, the student? It will be interesting to see if these ever gain any market share from laptops. More details from aving.net below.
"SEOUL, Korea (AVING) -- Raon Digital announced the release of its new UMPC ‘EVERUN’ equipped with built-in WiBro module in Korea market, which supports 802.11b/g WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity and HSDPA/Wibro. In particular, the new EVERUN enables users to enjoy 3G mobile communication service via a SIM card. Weighing only 460g, the EVERUN adopted 4.8-inch WVGA(800x480) LCD featuring auto-rotation and auto-brightness control function. It offers up to seven hours (12 hours with a large battery) of battery life thanks to its power saving AMD Geode processor and high capacity lithium-ion battery. It is available in October of this year."

Samsung 4G Forum 2007 in Korea

aving.net is covering the Samsung 4G Forum 2007 in Korea and captured the below information and images of an updated UMPC that I previously posted about. You can also see these images on Giz.

"SEOUL, Korea (AVING) -- Samsung Electronics unveiled its compact UMPC 'Deluxe MITs(model: SPH-P9200)' at the Samsung 4G Forum 2007 in Korea market. As a successor model of SPH-P9000, it can connect to wireless internet and VoIP phone via Mobile WiMax. Running on Windows XP, the SPH-P9200 adopts 5-inch touch screen, folding QWERTY keyboard and 30GB HDD."