A blog post has just appeared on Palm’s official blog announcing the cancellation of the Foleo in its current state. Ed Colligan himself states that the Foleo is canceled with immediate effect, as 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. Ed then goes on to state that he feels that the smartphone platform needs to be done first, … – So far, so good…

With Nokia’s recent move to converge Series 60(smartphone OS) and Series 80(keyboard communicator OS) into one platform called S60, Palm’s move is very understandable(and IMHO, a great decision). Why have two versions of Linux instead of just one – why force developers to create applications twice?

However, I think Palm’s timing is simply wrong on this one. The SDK for the box was released just days ago to the public – and heck, some developers even have working apps for the now-dead Foleo. This disaster is similar to the great Cobalt fiasco seen a few years ago…and does absolutely nothing to help Palm fix its standing with its already-pissed developer community.

IMHO, Palm will “pay the bill” for the Foleo discontinuation by having less and less developers willing to invest into an upcoming platform from Palm – I predict huge issues with Palm OS II developer adoption when that SDK finally ships. People will wait until the first smartphone/box begins to sell well…but this will never happen as there won’t be any software for it(OS/2, anyone).

I personally feel that Palm should compensate developers somewhat for their efforts…and make sure that the Palm OS II roll-out is as smooth as possible. In fact, releasing an update for a bunch of existing devices(say, TX/T680/T755) could be a great way to make sure that developers have an as-big-as-possible user base right from the start, easing the transition. Free OS updates can be done – just look at Microsoft and Windows Mobile 6…

P.s. As for the Foleo’s already in developer’s hands, we currently have no ideas whatsoever what will happen to them…

Related posts:

  1. Foleo interview: Iain Barclay
  2. Foleo Interview: Donald Kirker
  3. Foleo interview: Jan Slodicka
  4. A developer’s post-mortem look at the Foleo
  5. Palm reveals the secret third line: The Foleo