The Palm Foleo is going to be announced today, maybe even as I write this. In fact, some details seem to have
slipped out accidentally(?) in the Palm RSS feed already. The whole discussion will be shaped quite a bit by the rest of the details, but already it has caused me to consider e-book ramifications.
For those that haven't seen, the Foleo is rumored to run PalmOS on Linux, and has a size between a laptop and smartphone. It will communicate and sync with a smartphone, and allows email or document editng with a full keyboard and decent sized screen. Battery life around 5hrs.
Once we hear about a decent sized screen, we certainly thing about e-books. Will we be able to read comfortably on it, even outside? Is it good resolution? Will eReader or MobiPocket or other e-book reading software work on it?
But my interest is in another idea... synching your location in an e-book no matter what you read on. Imagine buying an eReader book and reading it on a larger screen. Then when you leave the house with just your Treo, you can continue reading, and you automatically continue where you left off, with no fiddling. Then you pick up your Foleo at home and continue before you fall asleep at night.
Sure, this could be done across many devices. It's really more of a software issue than hardware, but the Foleo gives a natural platform for it to be implemented. Let's hope that we see it, and then it catches on across other platforms.