Palm Foleo and Linux OS for summer is what Hawkins is announcing at D?
Woops! Looks like someone was trigger-happy at Palm and shot out the press release for tomorrow's announcement a little too soon! Apparently what Jeff Hawkins is going to announce in the morning at D is called the Palm Foleo (a name we've heard rumored before), and is being positioned as a "smartphone companion". We didn't know our smartphones weren't quite smart enough to need a guide to the interwebs, but the Foleo syncs to your mobile device, providing a full size keyboard and larger display for editing documents and triaging email (among other things). So yeah, basically it's a dumb device piggybacking all your Treo's most useful feature -- its connectivity. Apparently users can expect instant-on access, five hours battery life, Palm's new Linux OS, and a $500 pricetag to round off that Treo kit to about a grand this summer. Assuming all this is indeed the case, we can only come to one conclusion: damned if we need yet another friggin device. Seriously, please Palm, what we need is for you to improve the Treo -- or whatever phone device you expect us to carry and use -- not design the Treo its very own Lenny Small to hack around sluggish handset design. The yet-another-device philosophy doesn't carry, so to speak, and it's sure as hell not the future of mobile computing.
P.S. -No, that's a jokey Sony UX UMPC to the right, not the still-unseen Foleo.
[Thanks to Brian and everyone who sent this in]
Read - Screencap of the supposed release
Read - Treocentral thread
