Other PDAs: News: Palm Denies Foleo Delay

Palm says a recent industry report stating its new laptop-like Foleo Mobile Companion will be delayed is false. A week ago, Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg, released a short note explaining how software issues, specifically around synchronization between a Foleo and Treo, have caused Palm to push the launch of Foleo back a month or more to late September or early October.

According to Jim Christensen, Palm's director of communications, this isn't accurate. In a statement, Christensen asserts, "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."

Technically, that would give Palm until 9:51 p.m. on September 23rd, when the Autumn Equinox kicks in to mark the beginning of fall. Then again, most of us assumed Palm meant sometime between late June and Labor Day, which falls on September 3rd. That's the time when pools close and kids are on their way back to school.

Interestingly, Deutsche Bank's Goldberg said Palm was supposed to have released Foleo last week, well within the range of common expectations.

According to a recent LinuxDevices report, Palm has already given a number of Foleos and Foleo SDKs (software development kits) to some developers interested in creating applications for the device, all under non disclosure. This happened just before LinuxWorld earlier this month at a Palm-hosted "sync-up" event. The package was given away in bike messenger bags with Wind River Linux printed on the front.

Wind River Systems is the company Palm is partnering with to bolster its Linux initiatives, which include Foleo and upcoming smartphones slated to run on what's been dubbed, so far, Palm OS II. The Linux core of Palm OS II is supposed to be same as the one found in Palm's Foleo.

Foleo, which is a 2.5-pound laptop-like terminal with a large 10-inch screen and a full-size keyboard, is supposed to allow users to view and edit e-mail and documents from a smartphone, automatically synchronizing those files back and forth between itself and the mobile handset through a wireless Bluetooth connection.

In addition to working in conjunction with a smartphone, Foleo works on its own. There's Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet or a wireless LAN, a USB port, video-out port, headphone jack, and slots for Secure Digital and Compact Flash cards for memory expansion.

It's got e-mail, a full-screen web browser (from Opera, based on Opera 9), and editors or viewers for common business documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files from DataViz. A number of other company's have announced plans to support Foleo with third-party software as well (see links below).

Palm plans to charge $599 for Foleo, dropping the price down to $499 when it is first released through a $100 rebate.