Embedded Pointers

Palm Foleo is Dead

Well... From my last post I reported that Palm had announced the development environment for for the Palm Foleo was stripped version of Wind River's WorkBench product. I also stated that I thought that shipping the Foleo with a 2.4 kernel was a mistake given that 2.6 has been around for over 3 years now. In addition, I commented that the WorkBench environment cost as much as the Foleo itself, so I didn't know how that was going to fly in the open source community. Well, less than 2 hours after I made that post, Palm canceled the Foleo and made the claim that part of the rationale for canceling the Foleo was that the development environment was "too different" from their current and previous products.

Palm now claims that they are going to take a $10MM hit to write off the Foleo and begin working on the Foleo II. When I spoke to the Palm folks at LinuxWorld, I had suggested that they have an ultra-cheap development environment based on standard GNU tools to entice the hobbyist and traditional Linux developers to write/port code to the platform. Maybe that's what they'll come up with for this next product.

In spite of the issues with the Foleo, I believe that the time has come for a non-x86 based ultra-portable that runs Linux. A product like the Foleo (or new Foleo II) could be the impetus for non-x86 Linux to really start to take off and start on-par with the x86 flavor. Let's hope that even though this one is dead, that the next product, whether it's from Palm or someone else, is better thought out with the needs of the Linux development community in mind.

posted by PTR-Mike @ 9:12 AM