Yesterday’s news that Palm has canceled the Foleo was, to say the least, a little bit surprising. As you know, the Foleo was very close to being completed and released.

I was reviewing the traffic logs for Foleo Fanatics this morning and discovered that September 4th was the single busiest day for the site. Thank you for your continued support. As I stated yesterday, I will continue to cover the news and provide analysis on the Palm community.

I would also like to thank all of the folks who emailed me and left comments here on Foleo Fanatics. I know many of us were looking forward to being able to use a Foleo, either as a companion to the Treo or as a stand alone computer, in the coming weeks.

For Palm, their immediate priorities should be to complete the work on “Palm OS II”, complete the work on the first smart device (be it a Treo or Centro) that will run that operating system, test it, and deliver a stable product platform for their customers. As I stated in last week’s 1SRC.com Editorial, Mobile Linux – The Key to Device Interoperability, it is important for Palm to have synergies between devices. The decision by Palm to move resources off the Foleo I project and on to a new Linux OS and smartphones is a signal that Palm understands their the current marketplace and is now executing a plan to realign their business with the market.

In a Palm company blog post earlier today, CEO Ed Colligan announced to Palm’s customers, partners, and developers that the Foleo mobile companion project was being canceled. Mr. Colligan writes:

“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 smartphone 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 of our energies on delivering out next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.”

While this decision is hard to accept, especially here at Foleo Fanatics, I can understand Palm’s decision to move forward and put all of the company’s available resources into developing “Palm OS II” and the new smartphone hardware that it will run on.

Later this week, I plan on addressing this issue in my weekly 1SRC.com podcast. I will post more details as they become available.

Foleo Fanatics – Moving Forward

Foleo Fanatics was launched earlier this year to cover the Foleo Mobile Companion product and the smart devices that would have worked with it. Since the introduction of the Foleo this past May, Foleo Fanatics has enjoyed a fair amount of traffic from Palm enthusiasts around the world. Because of the community we have built around this site, I intend to continue to bring you the news and analysis from the Palm community, including the upcoming Centro smart device, “Palm OS II”, and Palm’s future developments around future plans for the “Foleo II” project.

I would like to thank all of my readers who have been visiting Foleo Fanatics over the last few months and look forward to continuing to provide you with your Palm community news.

Alan Grassia
Editor, Foleo Fanatics

Ever since Palm announced the Foleo back in May they have been fighting an uphill battle to try and convince people that the Foleo is not a sub-notebook or Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC).

So while I’m waiting for my chance to buy my Foleo, I have to wonder if Palm should just go with the flow as it where and market the Foleo for what is is being perceived as: a light weight Linux notebook.

Palm wouldn’t have to take anything away from the Foleo being a great companion product for the company’s smartphones. What they would be gaining, after some shoring up in the software department, is a new market of customers who would use the Foleo as a mobile computer.

What do you think? Click the Comments link below and let us know.

A new InfoWorld article out today reads:

“As stated on May 30, U.S. availability for the Palm Foleo mobile companion will begin this summer. We will let you know if this changes,” said Jim Christensen, Palm’s director of communications.”

I’ve been reading InfoWorld magazine for years now and I’ve come to trust their reporting. In the “yes-it-is/no-it-isn’t” ping pong game that has been going on about the Foleo, I’m inclined to err on the side of optimism and place my bet on the Foleo shipping before October of this year. We’ll see if I’m right or not.

Read the full InfoWorld article…

OK, there has been a lot of speculation this week about whether or not Palm is delaying the Foleo to work on software bugs and enhancements.

Today, Ryan Kairer over at PalmInfoCenter posted a short article indicating that,

“A Palm spokesperson has told PalmInfocenter that the company is still standing by its original timeframe originally announced back in May, saying “U.S. availability for the Palm Foleo mobile companion will begin this summer.”

So the question that every Foleo Fanatic has on his or her mind is: Is the Foleo delayed or not? I wish I knew, but I still have no idea which rumor is closer to the truth at this point. My only hope is that Palm pre-announces the release date a few days, maybe a week, in advance to I can plan to be at the New York Palm Store when it opens so I can get my hands on one with in the first 15 minutes of it being available.

Read PIC’s full article…

Ben Combee has been spotted on the message boards again. This time he is commenting on the #comments blog story regarding the recent Barron’s article (details) about the Foleo’s apparent delay.

Ben writes:

“I can’t talk much about when we’re launching yet, but I can say that the comments in Barron’s are a major simplification of what’s been happening this summer. We’re not stupid; we’ve been working on lots of complicated sync issues on lots of phones for the last year, including testing with a wide range of Treo devices. The issues haven’t been “it doesn’t sync”, but more like “after syncing large numbers of emails over a four day time period, the operation fails 25% of the time and cannot restart without resetting the device.” We’ve been doing lots of stress testing, and sometimes that finds problems that have been hidden for a while or problems that are really hard to debug because of the need to setup a reproducible case with instrumentation.”

OK, I’m feeling better about this. I think Ben goes out of his way to show that Palm is working long and hard to ensure that the Foleo launch goes smoothly and without any software issues.