In a post to The Official Palm Blog [1], CEO Ed Colligan announced that Palm is killing the Foleo, the smartphone accessory that looked and acted like a laptop, but which wasn't a laptop, Palm employees insisted. The Foleo was due to ship this month. (The Kerbango [2] was an Internet radio device that was killed at the last minute by former Palm parent company 3Com.)

Colligan's reasoning is that Palm is well under way to develop its next-generation software platform, and because the Foleo apparently doesn't use that platform, "it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design." It's unclear what the new platform is, but the post's wording indicates it's something home-brewed, and not the next generation platform that ACCESS [3] (formerly PalmSource, the company Palm spun out to develop and license the Palm OS) has been developing for years as a successor to the Palm OS.

Colligan concludes, "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." I hope that's the case too, because the Foleo only made Palm's stagnation all the more pungent.

[1]: http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbango
[3]: http://www.access-company.com/

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