Palm Inc. today announced the Foleo, a "mobile companion" designed to work with a Treo. The Foleo has a 10-inch screen and "full-sized" keyboard for answering e-mail received on your Treo, viewing attachments, surfing websites using the Treo's Internet connection and viewing photos taken with the Treo. The device communicates with the Treo via Bluetooth and can use either the phone for an Internet connection or its own built-in WiFi receiver. It's got Dataviz Documents-to-Go built in, so you can edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that you receive as attachments via your Treo Versamail account or via other e-mail such as Gmail and Yahoo! mail.
What's interesting about this thing is that it's basically a thin client for Internet use; while it's certainly a purchase to consider if you're a true Treo addict, it's also kind of interesting if you're not. I'm thinking specifically about people who spend a lot of their computing life in a browser window using Yahoo!, Google or similar tools. With this instant-on, 2.5-pound portable with Flash memory and 5 hours of battery life, you can get a lot done -- log into Gmail, use Google Docs, comment at the JFP Web site, and so on.
Another interesting tidbit is the the Foleo has got a built-in VGA port so that you can do presentations from the portable if desired. In a way, it's not a bad overnight-business-trip device, which is partially who it's aimed at. It's also a stealth Linux device, and the architecture is supposed to be open enough that it could work with other smartphone such as, say, Windows Mobile devices and, perhaps, the iPhone.
The PR doesn't say how much storage the device has independent of the phone, but it can accept CompactFlash and SD cards, so storage could be in the gigabytes, at least, using the latest memory cards. Price is $599 with an introductory $100 rebate for early adopters, meaning you buy it before it's out...U.S. availability is set to "begin" this summer.
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