Sunday, June 3, 2007

Charging a Foleo, made easy?


While we are still in the dark on what will power the Foleo there is one question I have regarding charging the Foleo. If the Foleo’s initial market is to be the Treo user, will the Foleo be able to be charged on the same standard Treo charger? One of the advantages I see for the Foleo is that unlike a laptop you will not need to carry along one of those power bricks to charge it as I suspect (Hope to high heaven) that it will use the standard Treo charger, be it at home or in the car.

While I think it would fit with the Zen of Palm to use the Treo charger there is still the question of how will Motorola, Nokia and Blackberry users deal with charging a Foleo, will they be expected to carry two chargers? Not a positive selling point for them. There are a couple of options I foresee that might work. One is the Foleo ships with a charger that accepts different tips to work with different devices (so it can charge the Foleo and a Blackberry say with a change of just the tip). This would be workable but NOT ideal. Far better would be for the socket for the charger on the Foleo to be modular. The socket would be user swappable to work with the same charger as the user’s phone. The socket could screw into place or slide. Apple uses something similar on the chargers for their iBooks (or did a couple of years ago).

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