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Palm Founder Hawkins Demos Foleo “Mobile Companion”

By Harry McCracken

May 31, 2007 — PC World — I'm at The Wall Street Journal's D conference, and Palm's Jeff Hawkins—one of the few so-called visionaries in the industry who really is a visionary—is unveiling the Foleo, a new device that he's dubbing a "mobile companion." It's a sort of a subnotebook-looking gadget that he's touting as being a complement to a smartphone such as a Treo.

Hawkins said he first conceived of it five years ago, when he and the other Palm founders were exiled at Handspring, but it was too early to build it; the technology didn't exist, and smartphones hadn't arrived.

The Foleo runs Linux, and has a 10.2-inch screen and a full-sized keyboard. It starts automatically; Hawkins said there's no such thing as booting it, sleep mode or hibernation. It has an e-mail button that takes you to e-mail that's an exact replica of the mail on your phone (which doesn't have to be a Treo, he said).

A Palm rep showed how you pair the Foleo with a Treo (which supports Palm OS and Windows Mobile phones). In the demo, it takes a few clicks. Does it support BlackBerry? Palm will address that later.

This is a very e-mail-centric device; it doesn't support calendaring yet, though that may come.

The keyboard has an unusual approach to input that reminds me a bit of a Lenovo ThinkPad. There's a pointer nub embedded in the keyboard, a scroll wheel below the space bar and a couple of "mouse buttons." But no touch pad.

Palm representatives showed off Documents to Go, which, as on the Treo, lets you view and edit Microsoft Office documents—Word and Excel, and some basic PowerPoint stuff. (You can't create slideshows from scratch, but can make quick edits.) You can view PDFs. Hawkins said it's easy to write applications for the device. We're seeing a Linux terminal window to show this is, in fact, Linux.

Hawkins pointed out that you can switch quickly between apps, even though there's no taskbar. Applications run full size, and they're all running all the time. There's an Apps key that gives you a menu of running programs.

The Foleo runs Opera; you can browse the Web over Wi-Fi or your phone connection. Google looks like...well, Google.

Hawkins said he loves a Flash-based cartoon site but can't watch it on his Treo; he can on the Foleo, which supports Flash (but not all Flash—it can't do video). The Journal's Walt Mossberg expressed skepticism over the fact that the Foleo doesn't support "the hottest thing on the Web." Hawkins clarified that it does video, but not well.

 

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