Like lambs to the slaughter...

Looks like Palm couldn't wait to get in on the scene for another failed device to go on your Microsoft table top computing surface, or not as the case may be. Initially I was excited - I'm not a big fan of Palm, I've always thought their operating system PalmOS really blew - however they certainly innovated in the device market. But having been a long time fan of Psion devices which have always had a superior operating system (that still lives as Symbian in many Nokia phones) I realized that Palm usually lags others in the innovation department.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that their new Foleo device is too big, too heavy, too battery limited and too functionality limited. As others have pointed out already you can get a smaller, more functional, longer life laptop that can probably have its own built in contacts and network cards. The only differentiator here is price. At $500 the folio is cheap - around the entry price for laptops - but it delivers less functionality than the equivalent vanilla laptop. But as Apple has shown time and time again sometimes less, and more proprietary is more to a niche market.

I personally think if Palm had made their Foleo more like the last of the line Psion devices that had a keyboard and were designed to work with an external network access device, then they would probably have a shot. Those devices were about half the size, weight less than a pound, fitted i n your pocket, worked for days at a time on a battery charge (some even used AA batteries!) and were great standalone devices. The only thing they were missing was a cellular modem with 3G access, something that just wasn't around back then. In reality we're talking about something that's about 50% to 100% bigger than existing Windows Mobile devices from HTC and the like.