Already forgotten by most people, the Foleo was Palm’s stillborn failure to expand beyond smartphones.  Ironically enough, if Palm had produced the Foleo, it would have been ahead of the curve on the forthcoming netbook trend.  With a few changes, the Foleo could be very successful in the current marketplace.

It is well-known that Palm is working on a successor to the Foleo deep in its labs somewhere.  Ed Colligan, Palm’s CEO, actually referred to the “Foleo II” by name in his public letter announcing the cancellation of the original.

Now that the Pre has firmly put Palm back into smartphone game, it is the right time to think about the next Foleo.

The first Foleo was the brainchild of Jeff Hawkins, the man behind the original Palm Pilot, Handspring Visor and Treo smartphone, and the idea was sound.  The Foleo was a Linux powered subnotebook that blurred the line between smartphone and laptop.  Hawkins described it as a “mobile companion”.  It had the portability, instant-on and constant internet connection of a smartphone with the large keyboard and screen of a laptop.  In other words, it was quite similar to the current class of netbooks with built-in 3G.

However there were a few flaws in execution.  For one, Palm decided to handicap the Foleo’s Wi-Fi capability.  Email could only sent and received through a tethered connection (over Bluetooth) to your smartphone. This oversight meant that the Foleo could only be used in conjunction with a smartphone, not in place of.  The second issue was the price.  The Foleo was scheduled to cost $499 after a $100 rebate, far too much for a device with its limited features.

For a new Foleo, Palm could very easily just lower the price (or sell it with a contract), include a 3G internet connection and include a few custom apps to sync it your smartphone.  However, that would not no much to distinguish it from the competition, nor would it leverage any of the strength Palm has in smartphones.

What I would like to see on the Foleo 2 is webOS.  It probably will not be implemented in the same way (no touch screen or accelerometer and all that), but much like how there is interest in porting Android onto notebooks, the same is true of webOS.  Putting webOS on the Foleo would help Palm extend the platform, attracting more developers to write programs.  If Palm could only recreate a fraction of the developer base Palm OS had, it would be fine.

The draw of webOS on the Foleo is its use of the cloud.  Features like Synergy shift the brunt of the storage and computing from the machine itself onto the server.  Palm also takes a distinctly different approach to Linux from all the other netbook manufacturers.  HP, Asus, Acer, et al have all tried to make their versions of Linux a computing kiosk.  The interface they throw on top does not allow you to add applications or tweak functionality.  Instead, webOS is designed to be extended, albeit with only webapps at the moment.

Whatever OS Palm puts on the Foleo 2, it needs to free up the Wi-Fi connection.  The inclusion of a 3G radio is also not essential to the device if Palm still includes a way to tether a smartphone’s connection (and carriers allow that).  The lack of 3G built-in could allow the Foleo 2 to be sold at a low price without a contract.  And finally that bring us to price.  The Foleo 2, like the Pre for that matter, must hit the right price point in order to succeed.  I imagine a device like this (ARM core, Linux, no 3G, little included memory but with an SD slot) to go for about $200-$300, preferably on the lower end of that.

A device like I have described could actually do what so many companies have claimed: to provide desktop/laptop like functionality in a portable package that you can use all day.  If Palm can deliver a device like this imaginary Foleo 2 in the next year, then Jeff Hawkins might indeed be vindicated for his vision of he future of personal computing.

Click HERE for a gallery of Foleo pics from Engadget.

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