What is not being said…
September 14th, 2007
…about the Foleo cancellation. Interesting analysis by David Beers:
I've spent some time with the Foleo operating system and it's a very nice piece of work, too. I'd go so far as to say that Palm's lightweight DirectFB windowing system sets a new standard of responsiveness and simplicity for mobile Linux. As far as I can see, it would have made a great smartphone OS. Given how far Palm had got with Foleo, there's really only one solid reason I can see for Palm pulling the plug on it.
That would be the wireless carriers.
Yes, there are a few black helicopters buzzing around in this one, but eventually somebody has to get it right.
September 15th, 2007 at 1:06 am
He also says, “Foleo will be back. I doubt very much that Colligan would have mentioned a “Foleo II” if he wasn’t pretty darned confident he wouldn’t suffer the embarrassment of a second Foleo cancellation.”
September 15th, 2007 at 5:37 am
I don’t buy it. Hawkins himself said that one of the reasons he loved the Foleo project so much was that it was someting entirely free from the wireless carrier demands.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Thomas, maybe (just tossing it out there) Palm hoped and thought that was the case, then the carriers got some lawyers to define and express their objections - perhaps to stuff like Foleo’s abiility to use Treo’s Dial-Up Networking (DUN) capabilities without offering the carriers a piece of the action.
The DUN thing was a big deal, for me. If Foleo lacked it, it’d would’ve been even less warmly received, I’d wager.
Maybe Palm realized they couldn’t release the product without that much-hyped feature.
Just a thought I had. I’ve no real evidence.
September 16th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
That’s what David is saying–the Foleo was free from wireless carrier demands, but the Treos are not. To make the two devices run on the same system, the Foleo OS would have to change to satisfy the carrier demands for the Treo Linux-based OS. David is suggesting that using Java will keep the system closed from the carriers’ standpoint but still allow for the expansion that Palm users like. (I think I have that right. Not a programmer.)
But he also said that the Foleo Linux OS will make a good starting point for the Treo Linux OS to come. It sounds like they’re not absolutely starting from scratch on the Treo OS, and from what Ben Combee said on his blog, that seems to be the case–they will be applying a lot of the work they did on the Foleo, if not necessarily the actual code, to the Treo Linux OS. Also they’ve obviously seen something of the Treo Linux OS from Ed Colligan’s announcement about canceling the Foleo. “It has a modern flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment.” It would be nice if they leaked a bit of it, or even showed it off at a conference or something. That would give the fanboys something to chew on.
September 17th, 2007 at 3:49 am
So does this mean that the Foleo II cannot happen because the wireless carriers will fight the openness of Palm OS II?
September 17th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I think it will lead to a more restricted Palm OS-II, but not the end of the Foleo concept.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Possibly more restricted, but not necessarily. Palm could build on a powerful runtime environment like CDC Java which could be extended to expose just about any native feature that they wanted. What these runtime environments do is automate certain memory management concerns that, when done by hand in native application code, can create bugs. There’s nothing inherently restrictive about that. It can be slightly less efficient, though.
My speculation is that Palm opted for the new architecture in order to satisfy the carriers that a new, open architecture isn’t the big risk they possibly fear it to be. So it doesn’t mean Palm OS II would be more closed (to the contrary) and it certainly doesn’t mean that Foleo II can’t happen.
September 19th, 2007 at 7:43 am
yeah, true. But I bet it won’t get the “Foleo II” moniker.
Or Foleo anything, for that matter.