All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.

I have, over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will. My motto is:

I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought.

Labels: Humor, iPhone, PDA

I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. 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. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

Labels: Palm, PDA

Some of you may have seen late last night or early this morning information about the Palm Foleo.Now it's "officially" official. And no, the Palm Foleo is not a plane, train or portable waffle maker. It's a smartphone companion that has a large screen and full-size keyboard (which makes email and working with documents much easier), Wi-Fi, and an on/off button that actually does just that...instant on, instant off (i.e. no boot up).

More details can be found here:

The Palm Foleo, Palm’s First Mobile Companion Product

Palm Advances Mobile Computing with Its First Mobile Companion Product

Check back for more info on the Palm Foleo during the coming weeks.

Paul Loeffler - Palm, Inc.

Labels: Mobile, PDA

Dell Inc. has stopped selling its Axim handheld computer line and will not discuss rumors that it may be gearing up to introduce a smart phone product by buying Palm Inc., a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Officially, Dell pulled the Axim X51 products off its Web site and stopped selling them April 5, after first launching the Axim Pocket PC in 2002, said spokeswoman Jennifer Allison. Dell still shows the Axim product line on its Web site, although Allison said only add-on products are for sale.


The decision by Dell to discontinue the Axim line is a good example of the demise of the personal digital assistant, or PDA, said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates in Northboro, Mass.


"The PDA is dead. Long live the smart phone," Gold said.

Labels: PDA