Thursday, December 27, 2007

The Fickle World of Gadgets

So the new Asus Eee PC is the new gadget darling. Which is funny because a year ago Palm was developing a device with a nearly identical form factor called the Foleo. The Foleo was so poorly received in pre-release reviews that Palm scrapped the whole thing. Which is pretty amazing considering that they had made it all the way production hardware and THEN decided to kill it. So why is the Eee better than the Foleo?

Palm tried to build a PDA with a big screen. The cpu, ram and most of the other hardware was lifted out of smaller pocket sized PDAs. The modern PDA has come a long way over the years but they're still no where near the performance of a standard laptop. And the components are hugely expensive compared to laptop internals. So the the Foleo was hobbled by poor performance and was a high price.

Asus manufactures laptops, so they designed a device based on that technology. Smart move Asus.

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