Palm Foleo is dead before shipping

The Palm Foleo, a new class of mobile companion devices recently announced by Palm will not be shipping - not now and not anytime soon.

Palm CE Ed Colligan wrote to customers, partners and developers an open letter in the Palm blog, saying that Palm should work to provide a single users experience and their efforts should be aimed at building the next generation software platform - a software platform that Palm has been working on for years.

Mr Colligan says "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 of our energies on delivering out next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market."

The company will continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from their internal platform development perspective, there will be focus on only one platform.

"Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on 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." wrote the CEO.

The Palm Foleo was supposed to run Linux, and automatically synchronise to a smartphone, giving users a better hardware platform to work on, with a notebook form factor, but with instant-on and extended battery life.