alice302

Are you jealous of the Palm Foleo somebody have? Here’s your chance to do something about it. There’s another Palm Foleo listed on Ebay right now.

This is a rather rare occurrence, and in the time I’ve been tracking them I have seen Foleos on Ebay twice a year, at most.

What’s the Foleo, you ask? In terms of hardware, it was a netbook. But in terms of market presence, it was Palm’s last big fiasco (before the TouchPad).

Back in 2007, Palm had a great idea for a netbook. That was a largely unfilled niche at that point, and Palm thought that the 10″ Foleo would make killing. It didn’t.

Palm never released the Foleo, because as the ship date approached it became more and more obvious that it cost too much (the Asus eee701 cost half as much) and not very many people wanted to buy one. In some ways, the Foleo was like the TouchPad. It had a decent design with several clever features but died due to poor mrketing, app support, and the fact it simply cost too much.

Speaking of apps, the Foleo died with such speed that not very many apps were made for it. Most of what I’ve found were the beta releases of office apps, and I’ve also found that some older Flash games will run on it. I couldn’t find a reading app, but Ibis Reader, a browser based Epub app, worked okay.

The Foleo is (by today’s standards) underpowered and it’s running an out of date web browser. Its other major limitation was that its email client required a phone to sync with. While I’m sure that made sense to Palm, it also hobbled the Foleo.

It has a 10″ screen, Wifi, USB port, SD card slot, and an internal CF card slot (in the battery compartment). The CPU is rated at 416MHz, and it feels slower than devices I’ve owned with comparable CPUs.

But the rest of the hardware design is surprisingly solid. I haven’t touched it in a couple weeks and it still has a nearly full battery. For a device that is in sleep mode, not off, that is a remarkable achievement – especially considering the age of the device.

BTW, this isn’t the first netbook, not by a longshot. But it was one of the first to be marketed under the name netbook (even though it never hit the market).