Well, months after the cancellation of the Palm Foleo, it looks like another mobile companion is on its way. Gizmodo is reporting on the Refly Mobile Companion, which is very similar to the Foleo, except it's for Windows Mobile phones.
The MC looks like a small 8-inch screen laptop (styled in Famicom colors), has a keyboard and touchpad, but weighs 1.9 pounds and measures 9x6x1 inches. The point of this? To hook up to your Windows Mobile phone via USB or Bluetooth in order to "extend the smartphone platform to a larger display, keyboard and mouse", essentially what the Foleo was trying to do.
The Redfly Mobile Companion is from Celio Corp. Their website describes the Refly:
The REDFLY Mobile Companion is a sleek clamshell design that includes an 8" display, a full function keyboard, and a touchpad mouse. Measuring just 1x6x9 inches and only 2 pounds, the REDFLY Mobile Companion offers over 8 hours of battery life and boots instantly! It also adds three new features - instant VGA output, access to USB flash drives, and the ability to charge your smartphone via USB.
REDFLY is very unique - it changes the resolution of your smartphone display so that applications, web sites, email, and attachments all have more room to play!
Sigh... It could have been the Foleo. I'm curious to see how the Redfly does after it comes out in March for $499 directly from Celio.
Another device that has been compared to the Foleo and discussed a lot in the TreoCentral Foleo forums is the Asus EEE PC. This small laptop runs on Linux, has a 900MHz Intel Celeron M ULV processor, 4GB of Flash based storage, a 7-inch screen, Wi-Fi, and weighs in at 2lbs. It costs around $399. I saw where you can get a Galaxy Black model at Newegg.com for $349.99. If I were to get one of these, I'd go for the black model.
Although I'm glad that Palm cancelled the Foleo in order to move on and get their priorities in order to work on the new Linux powered Palm OS, I'm still sad that we missed out on the Foleo. The device was so close to being released and many people were ready to buy one, even though the price was going to be high. I've still got my fingers crossed that Palm will come out with a new Foleo once they've gotten the Linux powered Palm OS completed and start releasing devices running on the new platform. I know we've got some waiting to do, but I can wait. I've got a feeling that there will be some cool stuff that'll justify the wait.
