Palm scraps Foleo dreams for now

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Palm's Foleo, its much-awaited smartphone companion, has died before it's even had a chance to live following official confirmation today that the company has decided not to ship the product, which was expected to happen imminently.

Instead, the company plans to focus all its efforts on the development of its next-generation software platform and will, in time, unveil 'Foleo II' as it still believes there is potential in this market.

The bad news of Foleo's untimely demise was broken to users by the company's chief executive and president Ed Colligan.

"Because we were nearly at the point of shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision," he said. "Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on a 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."

Users and developers in the main welcomed the news.

"Learning when it's time to walk away from a bad investment is one of the hardest lessons in business. Many people go their entire lives without ever getting it right... Apple's comeback started when Ellen Hancock summoned the guts necessary to pull the plug on Project Copland and admitted that it was time to try something different. Here's hoping that this marks a similar turning point for Palm," said one user in response to the announcement on Palm's official blog.

The decision to scrap the first iteration of Foleo will not come cheap, the company has admitted. "This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward," said Colligan.

"This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience," he said.

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