Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm's next-generation (Linux-based too) smartphone platform. My Take: A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device.
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Member since:2006-03-08
Member since:2005-07-06
You might get close if you find one with a very fast POST and an extremely stripped down Linux or DOS, it wouldn't be very useful to most people.
It could be very useful to most people. I'm tired of waiting for computers to grind their way up to being ready. Not all of the services coming on need to be turned on right away; many could be turned on as needed if the OS were designed differently.
Unfortunately, making a risk of this nature succeed would require an investment of time and treasure that most companies are unwilling to undertake, including Palm. It's cheaper to churn out more epsilon increments, even if this constitutes overkill for the average user.
For our part, we users are amazingly reluctant as a whole to switch to better technologies. I wouldn't be willing to buy something of this sort if it meant learning a completely new paradigm and abandoning all my data of the last few years. The payoff doesn't make up for the cost. It's like QWERTY and Dvorak in that respect.
Member since:2006-01-08
> the foleo relied on using flash ram, which didn't require power to keep memory ...
The Foleo uses flash ram for non-volatile storage and DRAM for program execution and volatile data, unlike older PDAs which used (battery-backed) DRAM for both. But they still rely on standby for instant-on, because rebooting WinCE/PalmOS/Linux every time is far too slow. And I believe so does the Foleo, unless they've done some very major work on Linux.
> It could be very useful to most people.
What I meant wasn't that an instant-on computer isn't useful, but that one that instants on to pure DOS (which can boot in about 1s on modern hardware) or to a very stripped down Linux console (you can probably get this under 3s if you compile everything as modules and use the most minimal init script) is not useful to most people.
Member since:
2006-01-08
No. About every semi-modern computer relies on standby to achieve instant-on. No modern OS initializes fast enough for instant-on without standby. You might get close if you find one with a very fast POST and an extremely stripped down Linux or DOS, it wouldn't be very useful to most people.
Even most cell-phones, palmtops, media players and also the Foleo also rely on standby.