Palm Suddenly Cancels Foleo Mini-Laptop

In May, analysts asked the question, "Who's going to buy the Palm Foleo?"

Now they know: No one.

Palm has decided to cancel its Foleo mini-notebook, according to a note chief executive Ed Colligan posted to the company's blog.

• Click here to read the blog posting.

The company will instead focus upon the "Foleo II," recording a one-time charge of about $10 million to cancel the first-generation product.

The reason Colligan gave for canceling the Foleo was one of development: the platform used to develop the device was too different than Palm's other devices.

"Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision," Colligan wrote. "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.

"Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential," Colligan added. "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."

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Questions had already surrounded the Foleo, although the device was generally considered to be an intriguing "tweener" entry between a smartphone and a laptop.

However, Chris Hazelton, an analyst for IDC, had previously noted that corporate customers might push back.

"IT departments are issuing smartphones, they're issuing laptops," Hazelton said in May. "But they don't want to have to spend money on a third device, which they'll have to be training IT staff and end users on."