Palm kills off Foleo before launch

Handheld vendor Palm has decided to kill off its confusingly positioned Foleo notebook/smartphone companion device, jsust as the product was due to ship.

In a note posted on the company’s blog last week, Ed Colligan, CEO of the manufacturer, said that it has become increasingly clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience and a single focus for our platform development efforts.

To this end, Colligan said, “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.”

Palm will continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from its internal platform development perspective, the company will focus on only one.

“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,” Colligan said.

The Foleo, was described as a “mobile companion” and more resembles a notebook with its 10″ screen and full size keyboard.

The Linux-based device features a suite of applications including email, a full screen web browser, and viewers and editors for common office documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

The Foleo can be paired with a Palm phone and edits made on Foleo are either automatically are reflected on its paired smartphone and vice versa or can by synced at the touch of a button.

It does not look like the project has been entirely canned, however, Colligan has already hinted at a Foleo II device.