I just checked out the online presentation for the Foleo device which is basically a human factored companion for small mobile devices. It's a keyboard and a screen with some software and bluetooth that synchs to your Treo, if you have one. But Hawkins' idea is pretty powerful and it makes sense to me.
I can't really get behind one as a first generation device and that's primarily because Palm hasn't done what I wanted them to do which is make the Life Drive manage 50GB of stuff. This suggests to me that they have always hedged their bets against laptops and the iPod. So in between having a personal infrastructure out on the web and everything that's on my laptop, there was no middle ground between the Treo and the ultralite laptops. Notice that the OQO didn't go anywhere either, so maybe it was a smart decision.
Still, for people like me who have industrial strength laptops which are too cumbersome and power-hungry to lug casually, there is no $600 device that combines everything I need for mobility. I can live with the Treo, but I do wish it would stream music or have an AM/FM radio and be able to read USB.
If it ends up being that there is no such single gadget, it would be cool for Bluetooth to grow up and allow interesting low-priced peripheral component products to proliferate. So in my backpack I could have a Foleo, a 100GB disk component and a phone which is essentially a broadband gateway. It lets the disk guys be disk guys, the phone people stick to their domain and the human factors geniuses to do what they do. Let's not forget cameras. A bluetooth enabled disk brick would be extra cool. Come on, somebody surely must have thought of this already. What's taking so long?
Did I mention that this Foleo should integrate with Surface computing's bluetooth ideas? It needs to.
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