“Palm is canceling its Foleo product right before the company was due to ship the new notebook-like device to retailers,” Troy Wolverton reports for The Mercury News.
MacDailyNews Note: The news broke after research group iSuppli earlier reported that Apple Inc’s iPhone outsold all smartphones in the United States in July, its first full month on sale, accounting for 1.8 percent of all U.S. mobile handset sales. Apple’s iPhone sold more than Research in Motion’s Blackberry series, the entire Palm portfolio and any individual smartphone model from Motorola, Nokia or Samsung in July.
Wolverton continues, “Palm founder Jeff Hawkins unveiled the Foleo at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference in May, calling it ‘the most exciting product I have ever worked on.’ Shaped like a notebook computer, the Foleo was designed to work in tandem with smartphones such as Palm’s Treos. The idea behind it was to provide a larger screen and keyboard that would allow smartphone users to more easily check their email and edit documents stored on their mobile devices. The company originally planned to sell the device starting this summer for about $500 each.”
“The cancellation marks a big public setback for Hawkins, who was the force behind Palm’s first two hits, the original Pilot pocket organizer and the Treo,” Wolverton reports.
Full article here.
Over on “The Official Palm Blog,” CEO Ed Colligan tries to spin abject failure into a tremendous load of something, “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.”
MacDailyNews Take: The world will never see a “Foleo II.” And it won’t care.
Colligan writes, “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.”
Full blog post here.
Some might think that this has nothing to do with Apple’s iPhone. Those people would be wrong. This — and everything else happening at Palm today — is related to Apple’s iPhone. Palm faces decimation at the hands of Apple. They know it. Apple knows it. Heck, even most analysts know it.
In November of last year, responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering, Palm CEO Ed Colligan laughed off the idea that any company, including Apple, could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector. ‘We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,’ he said. ‘PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.’”
Eddie hasn’t laughed since January 9, 2007.
Barring a miracle to top all miracles, Palm – as we know it today – may not be long for this world. It all comes full circle: Apple brought Palm into this world and Apple’s gonna take ‘em out of it, too.
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