palm

Something is bound to go right for Palm eventually. But when?

Recently the smart phone company swung and missed badly with its announcement and subsequent cancellation of its Foleo device. That's in addition to increased competition in the smart phone space with a slew of well-received devices from Apple, Nokia, Research In Motion, LG and Samsung. It all contributes to a public perception that the former font of mobile device innovation has dried up. Now comes news that a senior engineer that helped develop the Treo 700 and Treo 750 is making his exit.

Palm tucked the notice into … Read more

As scheduled, Palm announced a new product today for our friends across the pond: the Palm Treo 500v. Available in charcoal gray or glacier white, the smart phone sports a new, slimmer design (4.3 inches high by 2.4 inches wide by 0.6 inch deep; 4.2 ounces) and runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition, which means, unlike past Treos, it won't have a touch screen (hmm, interesting). It offers 3G/UMTS support, Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera, and 150MB of user-available memory with a microSD expansion slot. Other than the new look, there's really not much … Read more

If Fujitsu seems obsessed with the human palm, there's good reason: The company sees it as a key to the future. After experimenting with various forms of its "PalmSecure" technology, the company has come up with a mouse that can double as a palm reader for computer and network security.

Fujitsu calls the device "the world's first mouse capable of scanning the pattern of veins in the user's hand," according to Gizmo Watch. The company claims that palm-reading sensors are easier to use than competing biometric mice that scan fingerprints. We hope they … Read more

Our personal opinions about exercise notwithstanding, we grudgingly acknowledge that the convergence of consumer electronics and fitness equipment does make some sense. What better way is there, for instance, to get slovenly creatures like us onto cardio machines than games and iPods?

Yet we can't help but question the wisdom behind the "Elite Cross Trainer" from Star Trac. The main technological feature of this elliptical machine seems to be the ability to send personal fitness stats wirelessly and on the fly to a Palm device, according to Luxist. There's nothing wrong with keeping track of your … Read more

Ooooweee--those are some pretty enticing photos. It seems Engadget Mobile got its hands on some marketing material from Sprint about the carrier's upcoming portfolio of smart phones and cell phones for Q4, and if true, we think a lot of Sprint customers will be pleased by it.

On tap, we've got the HTC Touch with its innovative touch screen; the RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (aka BlackBerry Pearl 2), rocking EV-DO and GPS; the Palm Centro, the company's slimmest smart phone with EV-DO support; and finally, the LG Rumor, a slide-out QWERTY device with a focus on social … Read more

Mark your calendars, my friends. On September 12, Palm will be making an announcement about a "new device" from their friends "across the pond." Eh? Well, we certainly know it's not going to be the Foleo. According to Palm employee Stephanie Richardson's blog, the news won't be about the Palm Centro smart phone, either. So what oh what could it be? Do you guys have any ideas? Or what would you like to see from Palm?

Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced on the Palm corporate blog (here) that Palm has decided to cancel the impending release of its Foleo "mobile companion"-- a small, lightweight notebook computer running Palm's own software platform. The Foleo was expected to ship sometime soon, so development was probably almost complete.

It looks like Palm has taken down its Foleo pages-- all product pages and searches for "Foleo" on palm.com go to that blog announcement-- but there's some information on Wikipedia. There are some press releases for the Foleo on Palm's press site, including the original Foleo press release.

Perhaps the most useful page is… Read more

Give this to the folks running Palm: At least management had enough insight to realize the company was about to commit one of the biggest blunders in recent tech history.

Palm late Tuesday announced its decision to cancel its Foleo mobile companion only four months after its co-founder, superstar developer Jeff Hawkins, gave the product's first public demonstration at the D5 conference. A $500 mobile companion for e-mail was going to be an impossible sell, so maybe this is a good contrarian sign to Palm investors that the company isn't as brain-dead as some of its harsher critics … Read more

Suddenly, it seems even more fitting that a company called Elevation Partners recently took a stake in Palm.

This might be rock bottom for the storied mobile-computing company. The decision to cancel the Foleo even before letting people get their hands on it is an embarrassing admission that Palm's vision of the computing world is way off base from the rest of the world, and it's a black mark on the otherwise stellar career of Palm founder Jeff Hawkins.

It's hard to dump too much on Hawkins. The man invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo. I … Read more