wlmoore

Did anyone go to the Palm Foleo Sneak Preview in Sunnyvale yesterday? Anything to report? Or are you still hungover from the complimentary wine and hors d'oeuvres?

Malatesta

Guess my invite got lost in the mail

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Kupe

I don't want to know what might have happened to an invite with MY name on it!

Dieter Bohn

Mine too.

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wlmoore

Strange. I signed up for email notification on the Palm Foleo page the day of the announcement, and last week I received an invite to the sneak peak. When I went to RSVP though the event was full. I should have crashed it.

There's another one today at the Palm Retail Store in Los Angeles. I just called the store to confirm. There are more scheduled next week.

Here's the link I received in the invite:
http://www.palmsneakpeek.com/

Gameboy70

I called the Palm Retail Store in The Grove (Los Angeles), and they verified that they were, in fact, having a preview, but noted at it was invitation only. I haven't signed up for notification, but I'm heading to The Grove this afternoon to see what I can find.

The salesman added that they should "have some in a few days." I'll clarify that tantalizing statement when I get there. Hopefully I'll at least score some of the "complimentary wine and hors d'oeuvres."

braj

It is the first day of Summer.

Gameboy70

Just came from the Palm Store, where I'll be returning in an hour, when the preview starts. I talked to the store manage, and it's looking more likely than not that I'll be sitting in if there are any no-shows. This should be an interesting night.

Gaurav

any update? I'm curious if they will be having other previews in other locations...

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wlmoore

Outstanding! I hope you get in. If you do, consider contacting the TreoCentral Powers-That-Be. I'm sure they'd love to know what you learn, and could maybe post a news item about it.

http://www.treocentral.com/content/About/index.htm

Thanks so much!

Gameboy70

I was expecting the event to be more like an audience presentation. Instead, they had three Foleos for people to use. There was never an issue with hogging time with one, and the reps from HQ were, to their credit, very un-neurotic about letting us handle them. They didn't even keep me away from the Terminal app (it runs vi out of the box -- woohoo!), nor did they stop be from taking a bunch of pics with from my Treo.

I love the hardware. The pewter finish is quite elegant, but I was surprised that it wasn't metallic or cold to the touch. Someone in a previous hands-on article (here or PIC, I can't remember) described it as "velvety." I wouldn't go that far, but it reminds me of the 755p's soft touch paint. The weight, or lack of it compared to a typical laptop, was fantastic. When you hold the unit, it's like holding a book rather than a laptop: the weight's in your hand, not distributed over your entire arm.

The hinge is very well designed. You can lift the lid while the base rests on a surface, and the base will stay in place. Conversely, you can leave the lid at any angle, and it will stay in place without gradually succumbing to gravity. Unlike my HP Pavilion, which also lacks at latch, the Foleo actually does stay shut when closed without a latch.

The battery life is as advertised. Most of the time you can take however many hours a manufacturer claims for its laptop and cut that in half. I attended the event from 6:00 to 8:45 pm, and by the time I left the battery indictators on the 3 units ranged from 46% to 37%. At no time were they plugged in when I was there, and I was told that they had been running since 4:30. I wanted to see the power supply, but they didn't have any to show me (or claimed not to). I wanted to get an idea of its size. I was told that the charger is smaller than the Treo's.

The TC hands-on video gave me the impression that had to use the power button to power on and off. But just for the record, while you do have to use the button to power on, the Foleo turns off by closing the lid.

For some reason there was no WiFi signal in the Palm Store (!) to see the wireless mode in action. Two of the units were pairing with 755p models, the third unit was paired with a 750 which didn't have a DUN profile enabled. So the latter had no internet connection whatsoever and the other two were connecting the the internet exclusively by DUN. It was still reasonably fast.

In case anyone's under the impression that you have to have a Treo to use the Foleo, most of what I saw during the evening had nothing to do with the Treo except for DUN and one brief demo of synching with Versamail. I actually would've preferred to find out a little more about the full extent of the Foleo/Treo relationship. I couldn't get a straight answer, for instance, of whether or not OBEX file transfer is supported.

Since my most persistent criticism of the Foleo has been the lack of a native PIM suite, I was pretty shocked to find out that more than a few non-developers at Palm had been carrying around and using Foleos for two years. It's hard to believe that in two years of usage, no one found the lack of calendar synchronization to be a serious issue. Hopefully, Palm will license mDayscape from Dataviz and put it in ROM.

One problem I had adjusting to the Foleo was the concept of switching applications rather than closing them. Actually, you don't switch between applications (there's no equivalent of Alt-Tab); you just launch a new app. I kept wanting to close Word to Go before launching Opera. But that's just a transition problem. Ditto for the Menu and Apps buttons were I would expect Ctrl and Alt. The trackpoint nub was a little stiff, but I think had sped up the pointer in Preferences, I could've covered more screen with less effort.

Opera's OK, but I'm waiting for a Firefox port. Contrary to what I expected, Opera on the Foleo does not do tabbed browsing.

Only one of the units had third-party apps, but since I'm falling asleep as I write this, it's hard for me to remember what they were. I do remember TealSafe being one. Maybe I'll think of more tomorrow.

Overall the UI is slicker than a typical Ubuntu/SuSE Linux. Previously I assumed that the graphical layer would avoid X11 altogether and use something with more sheen like DisplayPDF. I still don't know what desktop toolkit they're using, but it doesn't look like GTK+ or QT. In hindsight I should tried poking around for config files in Terminal, but my impression is that it's a new toolkit over X, in which case porting existing Linux desktop apps to the Foleo wouldn't be too onerous.

Alas, I'm too drowsy to go on. I'll have more to say tomorrow.

braj

CAn't wait to hear more. Opera without tabbed browsing seems like a crippling limitation. Can you at least open multiple pages at once (without tabbed convenience) or is it like Blazer: only one instance at a time?

TRgEOff

eek!! 2005 technology. The retroFoleo.

Thanks Gameboy, much appreciated.

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geoff

Treo 650 1.20 LAP.

tirk

Not even tabbed browsing? So Palm has taken Linux and removed all that useless multi-tasking rubbish then?

I thought Foleo was partly a dry run for Linux Treos?

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PalmPilot Professional...Palm Vx...Treo 600...Treo 680...HTC Touch HD...

Kupe

Thanks for that well-constructed report Gameboy70 - nice to have some real insights into the device.

whatever7

So you can't even keep a search page and an individual result page open at the same. It's going to be pain the rear even for sites like ebay.

And I m typing this on a Nokia n800 with multiple opera windows open.

Is there at least a "system tray" ttype space so you can iimpliment gaim notification in the future?

TxDot

Tabbed browsing or the lack thereof has nothing to do with multi-tasking or Linux. It is a limitation of the Opera browser. I would guess that the high memory requirements of having multiple pages open at once is the issue. Hopefully that'll all change in the future when they put enough memory on the Foleo.

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wlmoore

Gameboy70, Thanks for taking the time to attend and write that great report!

If you don't mind I have some questions.

How many people attended the event? Overall how did others respond to the Foleo? Enthusiastic? Lukewarm? Was someone selling rotten vegetables to throw? (BTW my email invitation was sent around 10:30AM last week. I didn't see it until about 1:00PM that day and by then the RSVP page said all four events were full. So I'm curious how big the turnout was that overflowed their spots. To be honest I have my doubts if the RSVP page ever worked and if anyone successfully RSVPed.)

Was the feel of the keyboard like a typical laptop keyboard, or something lesser? Was the layout intuitive or did you find yourself looking for a key that wasn't there or in the wrong place?

How was the display? Any sense of how usable it would be in bright sunlight? Did color photos look fine?

Can you have more than one page open in the browser? No tabs is unfortunate, but can you at least do a "New Window" and switch among windows? What happens if you click on a link that opens a new window?

Did you experience any glaring compatibility issues with the browser? Any websites that just didn't work right? What websites did you visit?

Overall, I'd like your impressions of how compromised the Foleo feels. If you were stranded on an urban island with nothing but a Foleo, a Treo, and a strong Wi-Fi signal do you feel you could get by with its limitations, or would they drive you nuts and leave you longing for a laptop? In other words, when I'm out with just my Treo I know its limits, e.g. which websites are too painful or impossible to deal with. I would expect a Treo + Foleo to erase some of those limits, and I'm curious to know to what extent the Foleo delivers.

Thanks again!

tirk

I should have quoted:

...too. It seems more than a memory restriction; it looks like they've engineered the OS to remove multitasking, at least at a screen app level. More memory won't change that, without more changes to the OS, or at least the UI.

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janric

Gameboy70, did they announce in the sneak preview on when will it be available? I heard somewhere in this thread that it will be released in a few days? Is it correct?