According to PC Magazine.com, Palm has canceled the Foleo. You can read the article here. All I can think of at this moment is thank goodness: Palm has managed to avoid launching a product that was literally a day late and a dollar short.

When Palm announced its Foleo mini notebook earlier this year to a great deal of fanfare publicity, many of us really wondered who was going to use this device. Touted as a replacement for many users notebook computers, the Foleo was intended to be a lightweight replacement for those that needed basic word processing and e-mail access on the go.  Ever since the product was announced, it seemed like a never ending line of pundits were questioning who would be using this device and how effective it would actually be?

At LinuxWorld 2007 in San Francisco last month, Palm had a large booth showcasing the Foleo in all its glory.  I have to admit that the form factor and weight were very nice; however, when you started asking questions and looking at its feature set, to me, the Foleo fell far short of the mark.

Equipped with 802.11b Wi-Fi access, limited memory and programs, quite honestly, the Foleo represented old technology as far as I could tell.  When I questioned one of the Palm staffers in the booth about why the unit did not have at least 802.11g ., I was told "802.11b is the most widely deployed standard today." Excuse me?  Technology that has been out of date for more than two years is what you're going to bank the success of this new product on? 

Even with the hundred dollar discount that was to be provided at the time of the product launch, the Foleo would still cost $499, which is a significant amount of the purchase price of a low end notebook computer with a full feature set.  Apparently, the folks at Palm must've finally gotten the message that the Foleo was potentially a disaster. You can read CEO Ed Colligan's letter explaining this decision here.

I've been a Palm partisan for many years touting the benefits of using its products and remember when Palm was the cutting edge in handheld technology.  Unfortunately, those days seem to be passed.  While other manufacturers bring out new smart phones and convergence devices using the Windows mobile operating platform that are sleeker and continue to add features and usability, it seems that Palm continues to trudge along lacking both vision and innovation.  I'm afraid that we may be seeing the end of an era and that without serious efforts by Palm, the company and its products will become nothing more than a footnote in computer history.

For attorneys on the go, keeping in touch with our offices and clients is critical and we rely heavily on our Treo or Blackberry devices. My Treo shows the scars of being dropped and abused (and its predecessor was dropped in a lake), and I don't think there is a worse feeling than to watch it bounce across the floor because it fell out of its case or was knocked off my desk. I tried a variety of cases and holders and I'm still in search of the perfect case and belt clip. While researching information for a current article for another publication, I came across Otter Box and its product line: Otter Box makes a number of rugged cases and storage boxes for electronic devices including PDA’s, Smart Phones and iPods, as well as cases for general use. 

According to Otter Box, their Treo case "…completely seals device from the elements while providing access to keypad, touch screen, volume and program buttons, saving customers hundreds from having to replace or repair damaged devices." I've watched their demonstration video and it seems they put quite a bit of thought in their case design as it allows use of the phone, all keys on the keyboard as well as recharging and synchronization without removing the Treo from the case.

At $129, these cases are definitely not inexpensive, but if they save your device from damage or destruction it might be a very small price to pay for the peace of mind.  If anyone is currently using one of these cases, I'd love to hear about it.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that Bill Gates and Microsoft are the worst thing to happen to our society since the Black plague. This doesn't mean that I'm happy with many of the business practices undertaken by Microsoft or its attempts to prevent competition in many arenas. However, there are somethings that Microsoft is done well in the fact is they capitalized on the personal computer market. By the same token, I don't dislike Apple or its computer products and have always thought that they have held a niche in certain areas of the computing world. As I primarily look at things from a legal perspective, quite simply, there were just more programs available for a Microsoft Windows computing platform than there were for Apple. Until the recent adoption by Apple of the Intel family of processors and the introduction of Bootcamp and Parallels, solutions to allow you to run Windows-based programs on Apple Computer were not an option. But that's all changed.

I keep toying with the idea of purchasing a tablet PC, more particularly a "Slate" version without a keyboard but haven't been overly impressed with the offerings in the PC world for these types of computers. I've also thought that it would be helpful to have a Mac book so I could start familiarizing myself with the world of Apple computers to more intelligently answer questions from those attorneys who use them in their offices. My one big complaint with Steve Job's and Apple has always been a stranglehold they've placed on the computer hardware. I like to tinker with my computer hardware and upgraded as I feel is necessary: this is difficult to do with most Apple Computer's. In fact, I've always joked that you can have your Apple Computer any way you wanted it as long as it's the way Steve Job's wants to sell it to you. This is carried over into the lack of a Mac tablet computer and Apple has not expressed any interest in this market especially since tablet PCs do not currently have a large market share. But leave it to private industry to step in where Apple has failed to tread.

I was doing my daily check of Daily Rotation when I came across the following link from ars technica. It appears that the folks at Axiotron, Inc. have decided to fill a market niche that Apple hasn't: a tablet computer built around the Mac operating system and hardware.

Named the Axiotron ModBook(tm) - The One and Only TabletMac ™, the engineers at Axiotron have created a union between an Apple Macbook and cutting-edge digitizer hardware from Wacom www.wacom.com to create the world's first mass-market Apple tablet computer. Notebook.com has an article and a terrific video highlighting the preproduction model here  . All I can say is WOW!

Running Intel Core 2 Dual processors, up to 3 GB of memory, built-in Wacom digitizer with up to 512 levels of pressure sensitivity, built in iSight camera and optional GPS, I get almost giddy at the possibilities of this computer when joined with Parallels and Windows software applications. Currently, the ModBook is only available OWC (Other World Computing). However, this customization does come at a price: the base model starts at $2279 and quickly can exceed $2500. For those who have to be on the cutting edge of technology, this seems like a small price to pay. My current dilemma is trying to justify this expense. However, the current systems available for slate PC based tablets that are comparably equipped are not exactly inexpensive either.

For now, this is one item going on my "wish list".

For those of you looking for applications that you can load on a portable USB storage drive and take with you, Wikipedia has this list of applications for consideration. The list includes email clients, web browsers, word processors, PDF readers and more.

For programs written specifically for MS Windows to run from USB storage drives, check out the U3 specification and U3 Newbie Guide at Everything USB.

Reviews from the PMA
February 23, 2006

Hardware

Product: Hitachi Travelstar® 2.5” Hard Drive Notebook PC Upgrade Kit
Summary: Easy to use, good value choice to upgrade your notebook computer’s hard drive.

I currently use a Dell Inspiron 8600 which had a huge (at the time I bought it) 40GB hard drive. Of course, today I sit with a rapidly filling hard drive and wondering what to do. I purchased the Upgrade Kit from Hitachi to replace my existing 40GB drive (which is also a Hitachi) with a 60GB drive. I was intrigued by this upgrade kit as it included an enclosure to turn the old hard drive into an external drive.

The kit comes packaged in a red and white box which contained the 60GB hard drive, the external enclosure, a detailed, printed installation guide which also included a CD-Rom containing Apricorn’s Ez Gig II cloning and image creation software. Also included was a USB 2.0 cable, a PS2 auxiliary power cable and an external power adapter. All of these items were secured in separate sections of the box and well padded.

The installation guide takes you step by step through the upgrade process starting with the installation of the new drive in the external enclosure. It then instructs you on configuring your notebook to boot from the CD drive and connecting the external enclosure containing the new drive.

Upon boot, the Apricorn Ez Gig II utility starts and runs separately from your Operating System. Following the instructions in the installation guide, it is simply a matter of a few mouse clicks and the disk cloning process begins. The time remaining indicator started with 45 minutes remaining and it finished pretty much in 45 minutes. The installation guide then advises you to power down your notebook disconnect the external enclosure and remove the new hard drive from it. You then remove your old hard drive from your notebook computer and install the new drive.

To test whether everything was still working, I booted from the old drive and then shut the system down. Removing the old drive and installing the new drive (after removing it from the enclosure) was a straightforward task. I then started the boot process and the system came up without any issues or problems.

Overall, I was very happy with the upgrade kit and the ease of the upgrade itself. The external enclosure is not anything special: it is a 2 part plastic case, but it is sufficient for using as an external storage device using your old drive. Hitachi points out in the installation guide that the poser of the USB connection should be sufficient for operating the external drive, but recommends that you use the auxiliary power cable or external power adapter when doing the upgrade. There is a switch on the back to select either DC or PC for the power source. This makes sense as you want to minimize any problems that could occur during the upgrade process. You should be able to use the Ex Gig II software to create a disk image as a backup and save it to your old drive in the external enclosure. I also accessed the external drive after changing the switch to use the PC across the USB cable for power which worked. Total time from start to finish was approximately 1 hour.

The Good: Easy to follow instructions, nice feature set.

The Bad: Plastic external enclosure, only 5400 RPM

PMA Score (Max Score Possible is 20)

5 Ease of Use
4 Quality of Materials
5 Feature Set
4 Value for Cost
18 Total Score