|
|
|
O Foleo, Foleo! Wherefore art thou Foleo? |
|
But wait - Palm's Jeff Hawkins may have had a bad attack of the Not Invented Here syndrome when he hyped up his new baby as a "new category of mobile device", yet could it be that the Foleo is actually the Series 7 (or Netbook) done right - and done for the 21st century?
Not only does it check all the boxes that Psion's designers missed or didn't know about - especially WiFi, Bluetooth and USB - but lots has changed since the Series 7 came out. For a start, the one thing that almost everybody carries now is not their laptop or PDA, but their mobile phone.
And for many people, their mobile phone is now their portable data-store of choice. Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) isn't happening because people consciously prefer mobiles to office phones, it's happening because the mobile is where we keep our contacts.
So the idea of a device that makes data stored on a phone easier to use is a good one, even if it's hardly the revolution that Hawkins claims. Some of us already do it with PDAs or Bluetooth keyboards, for instance. Many more of us make our contacts book easier to edit by synching our phone with a PC.
I'm not convinced by the Foleo hardware. It's too big for a companion device, and the $600 list price (before rebate) makes it far too easy for idiots to claim they could get a PC for the same - a claim that compares apples not with oranges, but with potatoes.
However, if Hawkins is telling the truth, the genius is in seamlessly making the phone the core of it all. Sure, I'd prefer a pocket-sized companion (or even Treo client software for my PC) but the smartphone as my data hub - that's brilliant! And from all sorts of perspectives, not least security, it is also very scary...
Submitted Date: Jun 02, 2007
Source: Techworld.com
|
|
Suggestion about this article.
Report this article
|
|
|
|
News, Articles and Press Releases |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
