My ideal laptop has possibly just arrived

MY HEART is all a-twitter as I read the blog blurts about Palm's new Foleo device and the Foleo website here.

I've been looking for my dream laptop for a while as noted at the beginning of the month. Could Jeff Hawkins have read my mind with my desires to replace my Intel laptop?

I'm trying to hold my nose through the hype about Hawkins saying “Foleo is the most exciting product I have ever worked on”; does this make the original Palm chicken liver? There's also mark-o-spin dubbing Foleo the “Third revolutionary device” and lots of equally nauseating crap to get dumb fifth estate-ers frothing at the bit about how this is as nearly as great as the new (expensive) Microsoft Milan Table PC.

Blowing away the hype, I'll agree with two statements in the Foleo release 1) Smartphones will be the most prevalent personal computers on the planet, ultimately able to do everything that desktop computers can do and 2) There are times when people need a large screen and full-sized keyboard.

Anyone who's worked with a Palm or Treo can easily grok the need for a larger screen and a full-sized keyboard. All the folding keyboards I've tried over the years ended up being clumsy and awkward at best; two of them simply died.

Palm is billing Foleo as an “Internet interface appliance” and it will be interesting to see pundits put it side-by-side with Nokia's mini-Internet appliances. Folio has a full-sized keyboard, a 10.2 inch wide screen that supports either 1024-by-600 or 1024-by-768 resolution, light, slim, and can handle reading e-mail and web access. Weighing in at 2.5 pounds, network access is through on-board Wi-Fi or through a SmartPhone that can share access through Bluetooth.

No touchpad; Hawkins has gone retro and is using a pointer nub a la Thinkpad to move the mouse around.

What, no Ethernet? Hmm. Black mark there. OK, there's a USB port on there and yes, you can get a USB-to-Ethernet frob and I'm sure Palm will charge a pretty penny for it, but this is still annoying. USB should be available for, well, USB things (external drives), not bleeping network connectivity.

Battery life is said to be around five hours, and the recharger is akin to a cell phone form factor rather than a laptop brick. Good.

Instant-on and designed around a Linux-based OS, so both DataViz and Opera have ported software to it. Blog-o-sphere reports say is going to support both PDF and Flash, so Adobe's in on this gig in some form. Be nice if DataViz can come up with a simple, quick and dirty, HTML editor as well as flogging the Word/Excel/Powerpoint editing horse.

Other ports include an SD card slot and VGA out. There's also a CompactFlash slot under the battery so you can expand memory there. Onboard RAM is 256MB. Given the platform is running a tweaked Linux, this shouldn't (hopefully) be a problem.

Initial list price is $600, but first buyers will get a $100 rebate. Not bad

Perhaps my biggest beef is the way Palm is going to bundle this with the Treo, one ugly ass piece of hardware. I don't want to buy a Treo to buy a Foleo, I just want a Foleo and use my existing phone.

Another annoyance is the lack of specs on Palm's website. The blogger-philes and columnists have more details on the ports and such; Palm just wants to show you pretty pictures of the damned thing and let you read vague fluff about how it will make your lifestyle happy. µ