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When Palm’s Folio was killed off last week, most people were surprised… some (including our own Citanic) were thankful that they’d put it out of it’s misery.

However, to be fair, nobody here at Mobilitysite had any real experience with the device at all… and apart from curiosity we had no investment in it at all. So imagine what it was like if you were a top Palm developer, and you found out at the same time as the rest of us.

Astraware were in that exact position, and their blog explains what happened. They  clearly liked the device, the idea, software development tools, and the support they got from the folio team… and it doesn’t sound like they’ve been soured by the experience…  And you can bet, when the new palm os comes out (if it’s PalmOSII or ALP) then they’ll come out with some great software for it.

it came as quite a shock yesterday when we heard that Palm had canceled the Foleo. It took a few minutes to sink in, but in the end we came to a conclusion: it was a brave move to make, and if the market feedback wasn’t overwhelmingly positive then Palm being distracted from its core smartphone market trying to convince them about a new type of product was probably going to damage them in the long run.

That said, we are sad to see it go, and hope that it will be back some time. Being a PDA and smartphone company Palm had come up with the best integrated and most power-efficient Linux device I’ve seen anywhere. I did find the lack of a wi-fi accessible email client strange, but what it did it did very well, with good office applications, a nice photo viewer and a decent web browser combined with easy to use wi-fi.

Read the full story on the Astraware Blog here

PsionAndy (139 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook