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Palm's Foleo apes Ericsson from an age ago
The Foleo isn't the first mobile companion for a 'smartphone' as its maker claims. That gong goes to Ericsson which re-badged and adapted the Psion 5mx and sold it as the MC218.
So the Foleo uses Bluetooth to sync with a smartphone. So what? Ericsson supplied a suitable infra-red modem adapter so that you could use a variety of Ericsson mobile phones with the MC218, not just high-end smartphones.
And as regards battery life - forget the five hours which the Foleo allegedly offers. The 5mx could run for days. Plus the MC218 sprung to life immediately you switched it on. Strange that its natural successors, Symbian based phones, frequently can't match that capability.
Anyway, the fact that Palm decided to base the Foleo on Linux rather than trying to revive its old Palm OS is probably a blessing in disguise.
The result was that Opera was able to integrate its browser and give it the Opera look and feel in only a few months. This "demonstrates the value and flexibility of the Opera SDK," gushed Opera's Scott Hedrick.
The company also claims that Opera for the Palm Foleo offers 'intelligent' navigation features and support for Web 2.0 applications using Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
The fact that the Foleo has Wi-Fi which makes it way more flexible than any Psion based product ever was but also - along with the colour screen - probably explains why the battery life is so poor.
The bitter irony is that building a Bluetooth capability into the next generation of its handhelds proved too costly an exercise for Psion and it simply gave up the ghost on consumer orientated mobile computers as a result.
We're not sure how much the Foleo will eventually cost but if it's too expensive consumers will do what they did in the Psion era. Buy a laptop instead. µ
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