Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Did Garnet kill the Foleo?


While many think the Garnet OS is becoming a bit of a turd in the mobile smart phone market it is still managing to provide a better day to day working experience than anything else Microsoft or Nokia etc has provided. With Apple now on the scene it is arguable that they have lost their lead (personally I still prefer the Palm OS).

Reading back through the last couple of months of Foleo chatter I have come up with a thought (CONSPIRACY! - No not quite, but I do think there is/was more going on than just a need by Palm to focus on one OS).

From my observations I think that a primary problem for the Foleo was Garnet. Basically I think the limitations of Garnet (running on the partnering Treo) were making it hard (impossible?) to allow the Foleo to deliver the user experiance that Palm wanted. Any time the Foleo was shown off it was as far as I can tell, with an 802.11b wifi connection for internet. While this does make sence for showing off web browsing due to its speed over Bluetooth I can't help but feel that there was probably more to it than this.

So.... Due to Garnets inability to truly multi task or its other working limitations (Bluetooth, EVDO?) the Foleo was not able to do all that it was intended. This does of course still result in much the same needed fix, a new OS and a matching OS on both the Foleo and a Treo would also be the logical best case scenario to get the two devices to coexist and provide the best user experience.