New Treo looms as Foleo lives on in blogosphere

THE JAW-DROPPING, eyebrow-raising, nostril-flaring and breath-intaking may have passed but Palm's decision to can the Foleo is still causing plenty of debate in the ether.

In what could prove a cunning stratagem, however, the firm is set to next week launch a new smartphone that should go some small way towards calming the Foleo storm.

The new product is not, contrary to much chatter on the web, the Centro, of which little is known other than what can be gleaned from the usual murky shots snapped by PDA-obsessed sites. Instead it's a Treo that will be launched with partners Vodafone and Microsoft at a London press conference next Wednesday.

Unless the new Treo is something very special, however, it won't stop the chatter on Palm-stalking blogs and websites where some of the big questions being asked include:

Will there be availability of product on auction and other sites?

Did the mewling of fanbois kill a good product?

and,

Could the Foleo rise phoenix-like from the ashes?

Let's take them one at a time, beginning at the beginning.

On the question of availability, in his famous/infamous open letter, Palm CEO Ed Colligan admitted that the Foleo cancellation was a tough call to make, not least because “we were nearly at the point for shipping”. Palm will very likely have built thousand of products with considerable value, not least as curiosities and collectibles.

At least a few of them will presumably have gone out to manufacturing partners, disties, resellers, favoured media, ISVs and others. These could assume a cult status but it's unlikely that Palm will sanction any fire sale, given that this is the most embarrassing episode in its history. Palm declined to comment.

So, did fanbois kill the Foleo?

This one has caused divisions among Palm followers. A lot of people slaughtered the Foleo for being, as one poster on Foleo Fanatics suggested, “a device looking for a solution”. For every poster, such as the one on PalmInfoCenter that says “I blame all you asses who trashed it in the forums” there is another who rejoins “It was trashed because it should have been cancelled, it was not cancelled because it was trashed.”

The fact of the matter would appear to be that Colligan and crew listened to the wisdom of crowds and agreed with what they heard. The success of the Iphone might also have tipped the Foleo into an early grave.

Can the Foleo live again?

The wording of Colligan's statement (“I have decided lto cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration”) might give hope that the Foleo could be reborn with next-generation Palm OS software. But the Foleo brand is now toxic and perhaps a greater likelihood is that staff working on the Foleo could buy the IP and go it alone. µ