know this was coming, especially after this... and this.

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 our 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.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. 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, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. 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. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

Can you say.... Reality Check?

I think Jeff Hawkins was the only one who ever REALLY believed in the Foleo. It is true, that many of us wanted one, if for nothing else, just to have the latest and greatest Palm put out there... But make no mistake, the Palm community considered the Foleo to be a joke, and this announcement is surprising only in the fact that it took so long to make it.

No doubt that the "Fooleo" was destined to be the biggest bomb in Palm History, and yet Palm seemed to be sticking behind it, even confirming as late as a week or so ago that the Foleo was still on schedule to ship for "summer." It certainly makes one wonder if the recent investment of venture capital had something to do with this decision. Palm has been notoriously hard headed and arrogant about listening to their customers, perhaps the new venture capitalist saw the writing on the wall... who knows. Now one is forced to ponder if Palm is really turning over a new leaf, or simply acknowledging another disastrous product decision?

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