Ed Colligan, the Palm CEO, has announced on the Palm company blog that the Foleo, its smartphone companion device, has been canceled even before it began to ship. Instead, Palm will be focusing all of its efforts on its next generation software platform. 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 our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market.
The Foleo was poorly received by the press and Palm would have faced an uphill marketing battle with it. Colligan recognized that in his post, indicating that 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.
Before you mourn the Foleo too much, Colligan already suggests that 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. But the platform and smartphones will come first.
Colligan does go on to confirm that Palm will continue to develop Windows Mobile products but its own internal platform development will be focused on a single platform now.