Big screen, large keyboard, the Palm Foleo has put the idea of a two-box solution back into the smartphone marketplace. Steve and Stefan aren’t so sure that this is going to be viable in the real world, as their two-head discussion on the Foleo elaborates …
Read on in the full article.
For an alternative view on a two-device solution see AAS's article about semi-convergence and the N800:
The pro-Foleo arguement seems a bit stretched to me.
"I'm sure Opera will handle web applications just fine" ignores the important point just made that mobile browsers don't handle apps well NOW. So where does the assurance come from?
Also, Foleo is really a mobile web server??? Wow. That came out of nowhere.
I might like this thing if Stefan designed it, but I don't trust that Jeff Hawkins was anywhere near as smart!
"I'm sure Opera will handle web applications just fine" ignores the important point just made that mobile browsers don't handle apps well NOW. So where does the assurance come from?
I'm also quite sure that Opera will handle web applications just fine. Why? Because the device will run the full Linux version of Opera, and not a tweeked mobile version (that often can not run web applications all that well...). As they mention even Firefox might be compiled to run on the device if needed.
i use opera as my main browser but unfortunately even the Windows version can not run many web2.0 apps that i use. I frequently have to report to ie6 on my laptop.
Opera as a browser is technically perfectly capable of running web apps, even on cut-down computers such as the N800 internet tablet. The full AJAX version of Gmail for example works on the N800 just like it does on a PC, absolutely exactly the same.
The problem is that Opera has a very small market share, and not all web app makers support it fully. For example, if you try running Google Documents on Opera (even the PC version) you will get an error message saying that Google Docs doesn't support Opera. Google also automatically prevents any version of Opera from even trying to run Google Docs, even though it might well work without major problems, simply because they don't want to support it.
If Opera was running on 20 to 80 percent of PCs, it wouldn't have any problem running web apps because the app makers would make sure they were Opera-compatible. But Opera is actually running on about 1 to 2 percent of PCs, so web app developers like Google mostly ignore it, and even take steps to block its users just in case they run into difficulties and use up support resources.
In one way Opera is caught in a vicious circle: many people won't use it because it's not very compatible with web apps, but web apps won't be very compatible with Opera until more people use it. It's the same vicious circle that affects computer OS makers: their OS won't get third party software until they have plenty of market share, and they won't have market share until they get plenty of third party software.