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Yes, its true. Palm pulled the plug on the much maligned mobile companion.

As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphone that will take advantage of it.

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering out next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Palm made a VERY smart move killing this overpriced underpowered laptop. Yes, my words may be harsh but Palm has a responsibility to their shareholders (Disclosure: I own Palm stock) to turn a profit and building a third OS that will further segment its already segmented user base will not return value to their shareholders. Hopefully, Palm will take the lessons they learned from their limited foray in the Linux world and develop a robust next generation OS for their handhelds because Garnett (Their current OS) was outdated 3 years ago. Palm has a strong relationship with Microsoft which they can use to compete RIM and they have the guy responsible for the iPod lurking about in their upper ranks – USE HIM!!!!!

Although Palm took a $10 million charge for the Foleo, they need to pour more money into R&D, work hard on the successor to the Palm OS, and continue being open and honest with their user base. With that formula they can reclaim the market share they lost.

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