Palm Foleo: what?

Just read today from Engadget that Jeff Hawkins unveilled a new product from Palm, and no it's not a Palm handheld or a Treo. It's something totally different, it's what he calls the Palm Foleo mobile companion. You can see it below.



The Foleo is meant to complement your Treo smartphone, in the sense that if you want to read your e-mail on a large screen, you can just press a button on the Foleo and it will transfer the e-mail via Bluetooth to the Foleo and you can read it there. So, when I read about this, I thought so what? What's so cool about this? I mean we already have 10-inch laptops which can do more, we have Ultra Mobile PCs that Microsoft unveilled whose size and form factor lies between a handheld and a laptop. What does Palm add that makes it so exciting, and why is Palm adding it to its lineup, rather than focussing on making a better Palm handheld, something like one similar to iPhone that can do video, MP3, cell phone, handheld?

I really am not quite sure what Palm is thinking, I mean most executives have a laptop and a smartphone or RIM or Treo, so why would they need a Palm Foleo? The only thing I can think of is that to transfer the data from the Treo onto the Foleo, so you can see it in a bigger screen. You could probably do that with a regular laptop although it probably wouldn't be that easy or seamless. For e-mail, you would probably have to connect to the Internet on the laptop and then download the e-mail but there may not be Internet or wireless on the train for example. Then, that might be a reason to use the Foleo. But other than transferring documents over to see at a bigger screen, I don't see any other benefit.

On Technorati: Palm Foleo, Palm, mobile companion, Jeff Hawkins