For some time now Palm has been struggling to regain its footing in the marketplace. The Centro may be the boost Palm desperately needs depending on the expectation of users. Herein lies the problem. The Centro is designed to appeal to a young audience, one that wants a phone with personality and style and says something about who they are. The trouble is that there is nothing revolutionary about the Centro. It’s basically a shinier and slimmed down Treo, nothing earth shattering. The Centro’s main selling point is about a price breakthrough not a technology one.

Marketing aside, the Centro is the direction Palm should be headed. It is good to see Palm going aggressively after the lower end of the marketplace. What works in Palm’s favor (but could also be their downfall) is that the Palm OS is more stable than almost anything on the market today making it a great candidate on a device for the masses. This makes Palm “exclusivity” deal for 3 months with Sprint a head scratcher. They are narrowing down their range of potential customers who can purchase their product at the same time they desperately need the masses to buy into their latest offering.

I wish Palm all the best. I have used a Palm device of some sort for some time now and would be saddened to see them become a niche player in the marketplace. Unless Palm can get their house in order with a new version of the Palm OS software, though, their options are disappearing to more innovative and nimble competitors. The Centro may not be enough of an advance to prevent this from happening but it is a good start.

From the entry in The Official Palm Blog:

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.

The cost of the decision to Palm will be significant, and includes a charge against earnings of “less than $10 million,” according to Palm. What stands out to me from this announcement, and which was also pointed out by Michael Mace, is that Palm has been working on multiple versions of Linux, one to run future Treos and one to power the Foleo. It would seem that this was the decision that doomed the Foleo. The Foleo was never economically feasable in the long-run. It was too much of a niche product to support the costs of maintaining multiple platforms.

It’s been a tough time lately for Palm fans as they have watched the company stop innovating and be passed by in the marketplace by their competitors. At one time, what differentiated Palm devices from handhelds which ran other operating systems, was their ease of use and form factor. They did everything they were designed to do simply and quickly. Hopefully, the cancellation of the Foleo will allow Palm to refocus its attention on building of a better platform for the Treo or maybe even building a new standalone handheld such as a next generation TX or T3.

You can choose to play Triples either against your Palm (there are five difficulty levels)or another person. There are various settings available which will change the strategy of how you play the game. Like the rest of the games from Smart Box Design, Triples feature high quality graphics and sound effects with an excellent overall design. It should run on any Palm OS handheld running Palm OS 4.1 or higher. If you enjoy puzzle games, I highly recommend Triples.