Today at The Wall Street Journal's D digital conference, Palm co-founder Trip Hawkins is due to show off a new handheld that he has said is neither a handheld nor a smartphone ... but then, he won't say what it is. It's called Hawk and guesses often suggest it might be a mini-tablet device with a touch screen that comes somewhere between a Treo phone and Palm's LifeDrive handheld.
Way back in 2005, Hawkins told the Portland Business Journal:
I always think of mobile computing as personal computing. This long-term vision has led us through everything -- first the organizers and now through the smart phone space. It's like everything a personal computer is. Continue down that path. What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That's how we come up with new products. So I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's following the consequences of mobile computing.
Suggestions are welcome, but this post has been witchdoctored so anyone using the phrase "iPhone killer" goes straight to hell without passing Go.
The talk will be given at 11:30am Pacific Time.
Update: TreoCentral has a press release that says: "Palm, Inc. today announced the Palm Foleo, world's first smartphone companion product." It's essentially a notebook replacement that stays synchronised with a smartphone, and costs $499. But it could be a fake: the Foleo name has been around before.
