Palm Foleo: The Entire D5 Demo With Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher
Well, this video of the launch and demo of Palm’s Foleo should be a collector’s item, given that the company decided to junk the much-hyped “mobile companion”, created by Palm’s legendary inventor Jeff Hawkins, just yesterday.
Hawkins showed off the device, pictured here, which was supposed to go on sale this summer for $499, at D5 for the first time. It was greeted with less than enthusiastic acclaim by the elite tech crowd. The problem: Too large and heavy for so few features.
You be the judge after you see the video, but our own live blogger John Paczkowski even suggested at the time that it might get the unfortunate moniker “Fooleo.”
Given that Palm will be taking a $10 million charge for Foleo’s cancellation, that prediction looks pretty accurate now.
By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.
That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.
The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.
And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.
We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.
Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.
Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.
Here’s the Foleo, R.I.P.:
