The Worst of Both Worlds
by Nancy Broden
Palm founder Jeff Hawkins showed off the newest addition to its product line at the D5 conference in Carlsbad, California on Wednesday. The Foleo is being positioned as a ‘mobile companion’ to the Treo smartphone. Public response to it has, well, been less than kind:
- Engadget lists its favorite nicknames for the device - Foolio, Folly-o and The Palm Shark Jumper
- Ars Technica proclaims, “Palm officially out of ideas, debuts 1990s palmtop concept”
- The Inquirer writes, “We’re not sure how much the Foleo will eventually cost but if it’s too expensive consumers will do what they did in the Psion era. Buy a laptop instead”
- CNET UK’s Crave column asks, ” Is it a laptop? Is it a phone? No, it’s neither. That’s right — Palm’s third business is still a mystery.”
Ouch.
With the Foleo Palm is playing in the grey area between smartphones and ultra-mobile PCs. Palm is targeting the subset of smartphone consumers who rely heavily on messaging while in transit. The challenge from a marketing perspective is that this is a niche within a niche within a niche - a very small target audience. Compounding the problem is that this market is largely supported by corporate IT divisions who issue and support those smartphones and laptops. Will they want to deal with yet another device?
The problem from a product perspective is that the Foleo doesn’t solve the dilemma that is at the heart of the matter: how to keep the “pocketability” of the smartphone and gain the functionality of a laptop. Adding yet another device to the system doesn’t do it. There are really only two paths forward: make our devices more compatible and interoperable, and/or generate some seriously needed innovation into product development. With the Foleo Palm founder Jeff Hawkins is showing we’d better not look to Palm for that sort of innovative thinking any time soon.
