Palm Scraps its "Laptop" Accessory for Smartphones

Just a few months after the company showed off its new "light computer" platform, Palm has announced via it's official blog that the Foleo has been scraped. The company says that over the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around a new software platform the company has been working on, and a single focus for its platform development efforts.

The price of the Foleo mobile companion had been expected to be US$499 after an introductory US$100 rebate.

Palm says that it will continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but will now focus all internal efforts on just the one in-house platform.

The haven't completly dropped the idea of a light-computer platform, and do intend to launch a "Foleo 2" eventually, but based on Palm's new software platform.

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm wrote, "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."

The company is booking a charge of "less than US$10 million" to its earnings for the product development.

Posted to the site on 5th September 2007