Mobile Choice Blog

HP's new mobile phones show why the PDA market is dead as a dodo

Pretty soon, it'll be necessary to explain what a PDA is to people young enough not to remember their heyday. The massmarket simply aren't interested in Personal Digital Assistants any more, thanks to the twin growth of smartphones on one side, and music/video focused personal media players (PMPs) on the other.

The main thing keeping PDAs going recently has been GPS navigation, but now even that is moving into smartphones (and, in China and Korea at least, into PMPs too). The announcement this week of new smartphones from HP shows the trend.

Palm Foleo RIP. Taken before its launch.

Palm was due to launch its Foleo device around now. It was like a cut-down laptop, designed to connect wirelessly to Treo smartphones and provide accessible (and cheap) computing on the go. Since being announced earlier this year, it faced plenty of criticism from users, principally around the question of why they'd ever want one.

Well, it seems Palm agrees, as it's just announced that the Foleo is being cancelled before it even goes on sale. "I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market," wrote Palm CEO Ed Holligan in a post on the company's own blog.

Although he went on to promise a Foleo II at some point in the future, the company will surely be thinking long and hard about whether that's a sensible move, given the critical mauling given to the first Foleo.

Palm Foleo cancellation blog post