“Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm’s next-gneration smartphone platform. A portion of the letter reads: In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering out next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one. Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community. “ via palminfocenter.com
Sony Ericsson K850 vs. Nokia N95: 5 megapixel shootout
“This year several GSM cameraphones have already reached the 5 megapixel barrier. The Nokia N95 has been out long enough now that it’s even got an update – an 8GB version with a larger screen and a larger battery so obviously it will stick around as a Nokia flagship for quite some time. The Sony Ericsson K850 will be out selling really soon and it’s surely going to be the Sony Ericsson cameraphone of cameraphones. Taking those two with a pinch of the 5 megapixel LG KU990 Viewty must surely add for one interesting comparison. And since we were curious probably as much as everybody else out there, we didn’t lose any more time and we set off our GSMArena heads-on 5 megapixel cameraphone shootout – we thought that it would be fun and we really like to… well, shoot things. And it really turned out to be fun.” Read more here:
MOTOROKR U9 new music clamshell
We’ve already mentioned Motorola’s plans to expand the ROKR line with a PEBL clamshell. Now there are some new details on the upcoming MOTOROKR U9. This is a clamshell phone equipped with an external display showing music player touch sensitive buttons and track name.MOTOROKR U9 supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks and a QVGA 262K color display. The source mentions an external OLED-display (128×160 pixels, 65K colors). Other features of the new Motorola’s music clamshell are as follows: 25 MB of internal memory, a microSD-slot (up to 4 GB cards), Bluetooth A2DP interface and microUSB. Measuring 90×48.6×16.4 mm it weighs 87.5 g. However it’s not yet clear when the new phone will be introduced.” via mobile-review.com
O2 XDA Denim 3.5G smartphone shows up at FCC
“Now this is more like it – if you want decent leaked cellphone photos, then the FCC are the people to go to. Today’s tidbit is the O2 XDA Denim (formerly known as the O2 Helen), but don’t worry, it’s neither fabric covered nor strategically ripped. Instead, it’s a WM6 smartphone with tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, single-band UMTS/HSDPA, WiFi in b and g flavours and Bluetooth 2.0.Running the latest Windows Mobile OS is a 520MHz Marvell PXA270 CPU, with 256MB ROM and 64MB RAM; a microSD slot can add to that memory should you get carried away with the 2-megapixel camera on the rear. A second, QVGA camera on the front permits video calling, while control is via the 2.6-inch, 240 x 320 65k colour touchscreen, the D-pad at the bottom or the number keys sandwiched in-between on the sliding section.No indication of when the Denim will see release, or indeed where. Manufactured by Taiwanese Gigabyte, it measures a relatively compact 115 x 55.8 x 18.2 mm and weighs just 150g.” via slashphone.com