Update: Here's a glimpse of the Foleo's packaging, there's a big old stack of them in this photo.
Palm announced today that it has chosen Wind River as "its open standard Linux platform for future Palm® Foleo™ software releases." Essentially, the Wind River's platform will act as a development environment for the Foleo - this is basically a full featured development suite and developer support out of the gate for the Foleo. Here's the PR quote from Wind River:
"By offering an incredibly reliable architectural platform combined with an organization committed to operational excellence, Wind River is rapidly becoming the commercial Linux distributor of choice for mobile companies," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer, Wind River. "The stability and flexibility of Wind River's Platform for Consumer Devices, Linux Edition, coupled with Wind River Workbench development suite give Palm the strategic platform and tools it needs to differentiate the Foleo and help it deliver a solid platform for developers."
In short - the Foleo might be the "standard device" that corporations gravitate towards rather than delve into the "wild wild west" of linux devices. This is really good news - and it's a little surprising that it's buried in with the LogMeIn announcement (below). Palm and Wind River recently demonstrated the platform at a Linux conference as well:
Palm hosted a "sync-up" event with members of its third-party developer ecosystem. After signing an NDA and attending a three-hour lecture, participants received Foleo devices in retail packaging, along with Foleo SDKs in bike messenger bags emblazoned with "Wind River Linux."
In other news, Palm announced further 3rd party support for the Foleo today, this time in the form of compatiblity with the very popular LogMeIn service. LogMeIn is a simple Remote Desktop service that allows you to access your full (Windows) PC securely over the web. Its advantage is that it's relatively easy to set up, especially compared with the do-it-yourself remote desktop software out there.
LogMeIn is an especially good match for the Foleo, which could be described as a "Thin Client" rather than (as Palm employees will constantly remind you) as a mini-laptop.
LogMeIn joins with SixApart in announcing compatiblity without explicitly offering a native application. Instead, the companies worked with Palm to ensure compatiblity with the Foleo's Opera browser.
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