It’s time to abort your whole freaking species! RIP Palm Foleo

If you know where the quote is from and it’s relevance to the subject at hand, you my friend are very cool.

There is a strong stench of silicone vapor in the air over at Palm HQ as they kill off the potential category differentiator that Palm Foleo was expected to be. As you recall, I was fairly excited about the concept of a companion to the mobile device that Palm offered but it appears that 1.0 is no more. The convergence is certainly an interesting thing, in the world of Web 2.0, SaaS and more.

Nearly everything being developed is going mobile. Even my small shop has all it’s backends mobile – Off my Samsung Blackjack I can respond, create and update support tickets for ownwebnow.com via Shockey Monkey. I can monitor the uptime, performance, queue size and processing power of ExchangeDefender nodes. I can power cycle or shut down any server on the network,  provision new service, with the obvious idea being that all OWN information can be mobile, secure and available on demand.

What I am about to say may shock you. Then again, would you expect any less from me?

I am a fan of Apple for the twisted way they have virtually pwn3d the mobile industry. I know you’re probably thinking that the mobile industry consists of players like Microsoft, HTC, Blackberry and so on but the only true players are O2, AT&T, T-Mobile, Orange and other carriers. They dictate which features do and most importantly, which features do not make it to the devices running on their network. Ever wondered why its so difficult to stick an MP3 as a ringtone on your Windows Mobile device?

I feel that Windows Mobile really did not deliver on its promise. What justification do I have for that? Over the past month Own Web Now Corp sold more Microsoft Exchange 2003 with Blackberry CALs than Exchange 2007 CALs. People are demanding the Crackberry, which for all intents and purposes is an inferior product. But they want it because its more reliable. I too have dumped the Windows Mobile 6 Professional, which had far more features, for a Windows Mobile 5 (equivalent of WM6 Standard) device in Samsung Blackjack because I got sick and tired of really crappy performance. I just wanted a reliable device <check> which wasn’t made by HTC <check> that required me to wait to get to the essentials like contacts, email, web pages etc if I had more than one thing open <check>.

I, as a techie, settled for less that was fully functional, over the more that didn’t quite live up to the promise. Now, Melinda Mount, VP of Microsoft’s digital entertainment division says Mobility has the brightest future of all their devices. I think she is right. You can’t call yourself a Windows Mobile fan until you’ve seen the magic show that Jason Langridge puts on with WM6 devices (still waiting on that shipment from HK btw Jason)  but let me share something that I believe is the new development in the world of Windows Mobile fans, straight from one of my guys:

Rich Walkup: I finally got rid of my slave device and got a real phone.

Are we techies trending more towards the development platform where all our apps are mobile, or at least mobile accessible, or is the customer trending towards being more mobility “IT Basic” in their approach. I feel both are true, which is why Palm’s CEO gets the props on sinking $10 million into vapor and moving on to the next generation that is not going to patronize IT Basic folks but actually empower the folks that have a strategic approach to the mobility in the enterprise.