Gawker: valleywag, foleo

Did Palm's Jon Rubinstein know the MacBook Air was coming?

Owen Thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:44:16 EST

"Does it remind you of the Foleo?" Palm's never-released "smartphone companion" laptop, killed on the eve of its introduction last September, does look a bit like Apple's new MacBook Air, though the latter is thinner yet and far more powerful. Under the casings, there's little comparison. Which raises a question: Did Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who's now Palm's executive chairman, get some inkling that Apple would be coming out with the MacBook Air?

Rubinstein left Apple in the spring of 2006, before the Air began serious development. But he'd presumably have sufficient contacts within Apple to get such a warning. It would explain a long-standing mystery: Why Palm killed the Foleo later, rather than sooner. Better to take the financial hit in September — Palm wrote off $10 million in Foleo R&D — than to face the inevitable comparisons to a far superior machine in January.

Remembering the Foleo

Owen Thomas — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:22:11 EDT

Were you actually looking forward to the release of the Foleo, Palm's underpowered Linux laptop meant to be a companion to its Treo smartphones? Crushed that it was cancelled? Relive the Foleo's brief glory days thanks to this clip of Jeff Hawkins demonstrating the device on AllThingsD.com.

The folly of Jeff Hawkins

Owen Thomas — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:56:25 EDT

For years now, Palm cofounder Jeff Hawkins has been promising his company will come up with "a new product category" — some leap of the imagination, akin to the original PalmPilot handheld organizer, that will define an entirely new submarket of gadgets. The Treo smartphone was, genuinely, such an advance. And the way Hawkins talked up the Foleo, the lightweight, underpowered Linux laptop he revealed at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year, you'd have thought it, too, was a real breakthrough. Hawkins may have fooled himself, but he fooled no one else, including, at long last, Palm's own management. Palm is taking a $10 million charge against earnings to cancel the development of Foleo — and this on the eve of its release.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, a longtime associate of Hawkins, blogged the news yesterday, less than two weeks after Engadget editorial director Peter Rojas demanded the Foleo's cancellation — a screed for which Colligan, masochistically thanked Rojas. (I'm not sure whether that says more about Rojas's influence, or Palm's weakness.)

The company is now in a tight spot. The organizer market continues to dwindle perilously; the smartphone market has been roiled by the advent of Apple's iPhone; and the Foleo, Palm's supposed third product category, a shimmering mirage on which Wall Street types could pin their hopes for growth, has been revealed as an illusion.

Colligan, however, included a sop for Hawkins. And, perhaps, for the most optimistic of investors. He's promised to keep developing the Foleo, this time on a new software platform Palm has in the works for its smartphones. I can't see it happening, though. The Foleo was always a stopgap measure, a product for the here and now , meant to ease the pain of using a smartphone's tiny keyboard and screen until laptops get lighter or smartphones get more powerful. Apple fanatics will tell you that that day has arrived, in the form of the iPhone. I'm not convinced of that. But the future path of handheld, connected devices is clear — and no one, save perhaps Jeff Hawkins, sees a device like the Foleo as part of it.