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May 30, 2007
Foleo - Dare I drool?
Palm has introduced a lightweight laptop called Foleo;they call it an Internet companion appliance or something like that.
Basically, it has a 10 inch wide screen, a full-sized keyboard, weighs in at 2.5 pounds, cell-phone-sized recharger, can do e-mail and web surfing, USB port, SD slot, CompactFlash spot behind the battery, VGA-out, has the ability edit and display Word/Powerpoint/Excel files, can also display PDF and Flash, based on a Linux-derived OS, so in theory, you can port new apps over to it.
Connectivity is via either Bluetooth (and thence to your EVDO-smartphone) or Wi-Fi. No Ethernet.
Booooh. 2.4 GHz is too noisy and burns battery power. But Palm has never been known as a bleeding edge tech company; would have been better if they had shoved in Wireless USB (next year, @#$!).
Your (secure, non-battery-burning) alternative is likely to be to tie up the USB port with a USB to Ethernet frob.
Onboard RAM is 256MB, according to sources, with additional storage via SD or CompactFlash. So I guess you can chip and stash your music and/or a movie or two. Be interesting to see if they have a slimline external DVD option to play movies for those pain-in-the-rear plane flights.
Opening cost is $499, supposedly going to go up to $599 once the intro is over. I want to see one first before I burn that much cash on something that is almost-but-not-quite an Intel-based laptop.
Haven't seen any notes on if it supports external headphones or mic, but in this day and age, I would certainly hope so.
Posted by dmohney at May 30, 2007 04:29 PM