Palm Foleo.

The Palm foleo. This device has created such an uproar in the geek hand held computing circle that entire wars have been fought both online and offline, people have DIED over Jeff Hawkings vision! (Okay I might be exaggerating a bit there).

People are convinced this is the end for Palm since it's a "Useless" device and you can do more with a keyboard for your Treo. Heck Shawn, you can buy a Acer laptop that has way more features for the same price now!

Yes, but can that laptop computer boot instantly? Can that laptop computer fit into your briefcase? Can that laptop computer edit Office documents out of the box?

No, No, and I suppose if you downloaded Openoffice. Here's the thing, Palm is marketing this as a second device to help you make your Treo (Or other smartphone) your /MAIN/ computer. The average business user (Who this is targeted for, this is /NOT/ a gaming computer or a computer for your average Geek who needs horsepower for Linux hacking) uses their computer for a few tasks.

1) Email. The Foleo will do this perfectly. Palm knows what they are doing when it comes to email, Versamail on the treo works great.

2) Web browsing. The foleo will include a version of the Opera browser! Opera knows how to make a browser!

3) Editing office documents. The Foleo includes a version of Dataviz's Documents to go which has for many years been keeping Palm users in Office files. Heck I prefer it to Openoffice now as every single document or spreadsheat I've thrown at it looks great on my Treo and since it stores files in their native formats now the email attachment theory is solved.

There are other programs you may need to run that the Foleo won't have support for, as an example my company uses a program that's older then dirt for all our business, until we are forced to upgrade to the new web based software I need a way to access that program. Well guess what? Logmein has been added to the list of developers who are coding for the Foleo!
This will give you access to your desktop computer where you can run your software remotely!

I'm sure the opensource people will port a version of VNC to the Foleo platform as well which would do the same thing for free, and since there is a version of VNC for the Treo I don't see an issue with that! (BTW, while the screen on the treo is small, I've used it with VNC to look up information in the old as dirt program mentioned above!)


In my next post I'll be discussing ways to keep multi email address in sync when your on the road!