I have absolutely no idea, whatsoever, why Palm has decided to come out with a new product called the Foleo. It's a sort of sub-compact notebook computer by all early indications. A step up from a "smartphone" a step down from a real notebook.
We just got our grubby little paws on that new Palm Foleo. We'll give you one guess about what we think. Ok, ok, look, it's an interesting device and an interesting concept, and we're long-time Palm fans. We like the scroll wheel, the keyboard and screen were very nice, and the browser works excellently (and with Flash! see the gallery). It's wonderful that it works so well with your phone and all of that business, but we just can't get behind this one. We need a better Treo, or we need a Foleo or like device that replaces your Treo — we don't want both.
Go look at the pictures. Which look a LOT like the notebook I am using. A Dell Latitude D400. It has no optical drives (it uses an external bay for those), a very small screen – about the same size as the Palm, apparently and is, frankly, darn near weightless as laptops go. The Dell has WiFi, Bluetooth and a LAN card along with USB 2.0, 1.4GHz Pentium M, 512Mb Ram (expandable), mine has a 40Gb HDD installed, runs Ubuntu Linux flawlessly and did I mention almost weightless. But it is annoyingly small to work on for any length of time – handy as heck, mind you, but annoying because it is so tiny. (And when you add all the necessities like the optical drive bay, AC adaptor, wireless mouse (I can't stand touchpads) and whatnot, It weighs close to the same as a larger laptop – but still has the tiny screen.)
I think Palm actually went backwards on this design.
