Click to View

Due to ship this summer, Palm has apparently delayed the release of Foleo, the first in a new line of products from the company called Mobile Companions, according to an industry analyst.

The analyst, Deutsche Bank's Jonathan Goldberg, released a short note explaining how software issues have caused Palm to push the launch of Foleo back a month or more.

Goldberg wrote: "The product was supposed to hit Palm stores this week, but was delayed when software bugs were detected. These apparently included an inability to synchronize the Foleo with most models of the Treo, in particular the nominally high-volume Treo 680."

If accurate, that's a huge problem for Palm, as synchronization to smartphones, particularly the company's own Treo models, makes up a significant portion of what Foleo is about.

Linux-run Foleo, which is a 2.5-pound laptop-like terminal with a large 10-inch screen and a full-size keyboard, is supposed to allow users to view and edit e-mail and documents from a smartphone, automatically synchronizing those files back and forth between itself and the mobile handset through a wireless Bluetooth connection.

In addition to working in conjunction with a smartphone, Foleo works on its own. There's Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet or a wireless LAN, a USB port, video-out port, headphone jack, and slots for Secure Digial and Compact Flash cards for memory expansion.

It's got e-mail, a full-screen web browser (from Opera, based on Opera 9), and editors or viewers for common business documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files from DataViz. A number of other company's have announced plans to support Foleo with third-party software as well (see links below).

The response to Foleo has generally been less than stellar, as many question how attractive carrying around a second gadget, no matter how thin— Palm asserts Foleo is the thinnest device ever with a full-size keyboard—will be to consumers, let alone one that is essentially laptop, but without the full-power of desktop operating system.

Palm plans to charge $499 for Foleo, dropping the price down to $399 when it is first released through a $100 rebate.