Sprint Agrees to Unlock Phones: Reminiscent of the days during the “Ma Bell” breakup, back when you had to rent or buy equipment from your service provider (under the pretense that 3rd party phones would mess up their network).

I have to confess that as a Palm Treo user I was slightly disappointed to hear that the Foleo has been canceled. Not that I would have paid $500 – $600 for such a device, but I think that Jeff Hawkins is onto something with his version of the mobile companion concept (similar to a subnotebook). For all of the jeers Palm has received (such as “Fool-eo” and “Folly-o”), Hawkins and company CEO Ed Colligan are not alone in their belief “that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential.” In fact, Asus, Via and UMPC are working on delivering similar devices to consumers. However, of the four three only the Eee PC by Asus is priced right to sell the notion of mobile companions to the masses.

One of the criticisms of the Palm Foleo was that it had a price point of $600 ($500 after rebates for early adopters) in a market where $400 to $600 laptop computers are a dime a dozen. Sure, you are giving up on size, but gaining in processing power and storage capacity. “There was nothing innovative [enough] about the Foleo” was another complaint, although similarly sized PC’s have previously sold for more than double or triple the cost. Enter the Asus Eee PC; offspring of the one-laptop per child project; affordably priced at $249.

Have you looked at what they are asking for desktop PC’s lately? Even Macs have come way down in price with the introduction of the Mac Mini. You can now get a home computer with a blazingly fast processor, beau coups of memory and all the bells and whistles for less than $600. However, try to get those same specs in a laptop and you are talking $1,000 minimum, if not more like $1,700 to $2,500 for the wider screened editions (sadly, this is the range I paid for a Win98 Compaq desktop in 1995 and my current WinXP box that I have had since 2003).

There will always be exceptions — mobile professionals running resource intensive applications, hardcore gamers, the space conscious, etc. — but when I travel for both business and pleasure I end up using two, sometimes three, features on my IBM ThinkPad: email, web browsing and the working on the occasional office document (spreadsheet/text). Each one of these tasks can be easily handled by a modestly sized and moderately priced mobile companion. I also believe that there are many people in the marketplace who fall into this same category.

It may seem like a stupid idea to go out and buy a mobile companion that can do less for a slightly lower price than many Windows laptops, but when you factor in the size, simplicity, short boot-up times, savings and (most importantly) intended usage; it makes spending $2200 on an “entertainment laptop” look like buying a dump truck when all you really need is a small pickup to get the job done. In fact, you might even find yourself waiting less and less to use that powerful desktop back at the home or office.

Part II will explore some of the practical considerations of owning a mobile companion relative to smartphones, mobile computing and changing lifestyles.

A little over a month ago — during my blogging drought and literally months and months after signing up with Text Link Ads — I finally sold a couple ads (one post-specific and one on the sidebar). The irony is that I was hardly blogging at the time. Yesterday I received a PayPal payment for $7.80 in advertising revenue, which is 56% greater than the $5.00 a month that I pay A Small Orange for hosting. It not much money in the grand scheme of things, but simply being able to break-even on my blogs has served as another small motivation to keep on blogging. What are some of the small things that motivate you to blog?

It started with selling computers sans operating systems.  Now Dell is planning to sell PC’s and laptops with Linux pre-installed. An interesting twist is that Dell believes that Linux users will require less from the company by way of technical support.

…the majority of survey respondents said that existing community-based support forums would meet their technical support needs. So while Dell is hammering out the details of which Linux distribution(s) to use and how to support it/them, it seems most users don’t really need vendor help.

I would think that if Linux requesters are savvy enough to rely on their peers for tech support, then they could probably save themselves a few bucks and load any of the popular Linux distros themselves. In other words, it appears to me that Dell is taking square aim at “gnubies” (first time Linux users). Hopefully this a big step forward in terms of making Linux more mainstream.

My wife relayed this conversation to me that she had a Walgreen’s today. I thought it was kind of funny…and so true.

My Wife: You seem to have a lull in here…the day before Valentine’s.

Manager: Yeah, the wives have already bought for the husbands and the boyfriends for the girlfriends. It won’t be until tomorrow afternoon when the husbands will buy for the wives. Then we’ll be busy.