Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Charles Stross, my new favorite scifi author, has just weighed in on the Palm Foleo. W00t!! I love it when worlds collide like this, things get all plasmic. And you know my dislike for standing on solid ground for too long.

I was going to hold off on commenting about the Foleo. But I’m highly caffeinated and talkative. It’s a Saturday so almost no one will be at work, Mario caught whatever bug it was that knocked me out last week and is asleep on the couch, and Russ is watching Alex today. That’s pretty much everyone I know in the real world… so I’ll use my blog for what God intended them to be used for, wild speculation and useless blathering.

First of all, what do I love about the Foleo? Linux, first and of course. Not just running Linux, but running Linux and meant to be an open platform. Personally I think that gets right to the heart of what makes Palm interesting. When I got my first Palm 1000 I got it for exactly one reason: there was a GCC based toolkit that I could use to build apps for it myself. If I couldn’t make apps for it myself I would not have gotten it. If the tools weren’t open source I wouldn’t have gotten it. If it were some random set of tools outside the established project of GCC I wouldn’t have gotten it.

It was something that was just right about the initial Palm platform. However, it wasn’t also something that I think Palm did intentionally. If I remember correctly there were a few commercial toolkits for the platform, but then someone in the outside community realized that support for the processor instruction set was already in GCC, the architecture just needed to be supported by the tools, add a resource bundler, and kapow! you have an open source toolkit end to end. Even the much revered Palm Emulator started life as an open source project called Copilot. And Palm took over the project only after the original author no longer had time to maintain it.

Whatever the cause I am absolutely convinced that it was the open nature of the platform and the thriving developer base that led to the success of the early Palm devices. They were cheap, but just about anything you wanted to do with one you could find some bit of software to play with. The Palm users have continued to provide a thriving software audience still. Compare percentage wise numbers between Palm users and other smartphone styles. As of last year, the last time I checked on the numbers, the Palm users were still much more likely to have installed a third party application on their phone than any other style of smartphone. I have to assume that the Windows Mobile numbers have really caught up, but I’m sure no one else has.

So I love the open part, love the Linux part. What do I not like? The battery life is too short, it costs too much, its too big, it doesn’t have a touchscreen, and can’t be used in a tablet layout. Even if I completely detach myself from my very geek-centric outlook, I just have a hard time imagining the user for whom this is a good choice.

That being said, there is a void right now in the set of devices available for “information workers”. I think that’s what much of the tablet and UMPC market is going after. The post in which Michael Mace describes the device he would like to see produced, which he calls an info pad, I think really captures a lot of what I think is missing from the current landscape of devices.

When I heard that Palm had released a device meant to be used as a companion to the Treo for more information rich interactions, I assumed they hit something of the kind. Then I read the posts about the device and realized, it’s just a PC. It’s just naming. Somehow marketing got to take over the whole thing, everyone got suckered in, and a random comment that “actually the phone is your primary device, and the PC is just an accessory to that!” that someone popped into some brainstorming session got blown all out of proportion. And we end up with what is effectively a laptop with a new name. However, calling it a Foleo doesn’t change the fact that it’s a PC.

So how about going after the corporate user? Palm has a platform that they’re going to put out, which the Foleo ties into, that enables a Blackberry style ultrakickassemail style experience, but apply that same slickness to other applications as well? Interesting. Very interesting. However, I don’t believe it. It could happen, I’m not saying it won’t. But damn it would be a long shot. Why?

First off, Palm isn’t an infrastructure company. They’ve never done that right when they try to be, and they sure have tried. Second, Linux server developers haven’t managed to make good hookins to existing corporate infrastructure for general Linux PC users. I’m a Linux user at work, I just can’t get anything else really setup comfortably to do dev work on. I have a Mac laptop, but my main machine is Linux. We have an Exchange server at the office and the thing is the bane of my fucking existence! It works with nothing, the IMAP support is buggy, no one seems to know how I can do calendaring from anything except Exchange, I can’t even get ical feeds out of the thing, the web access functions only really work from IE, there are some Evolution plugins that do the job but are buggy (or not open source, which in my book counts as buggy by default). I have no idea how this piece of junk is the “enterprise standard” for workgroup applications. I wish I had had the time back in those days when it got installed to fight against it and get Spikesource involved. However now I’m stuck with it, we’re stuck with it, and although it makes some peoples lives easier, I would like to chuck the thing out the window.

This is life on the corporate network, and we’re a startup company even! I can only imagine it’s worse at bigger companies, which is what I have to assume Palm would be going after if they’re going after the sweet corporate meat. Do they have the jujitsu required to get whatever they’re doing installed instead of the current “industry standard” solutions? Or are they going to compete with Microsoft and Blackberry head to head? And with Microsoft it’s competing for the mobile extension to a platform they already own, and given the direction of Windows Mobile are obviously not interested in handing over to someone else.

No, I think the Foleo is just a laptop, and the magic platform that Palm is supposedly cooking up to solve the corporate woes is just bunk. Wrong market, wrong time, wrong device. Next!