One day in the world and the Palm Foleo is already drawing heat. The first one is from Wired’s Gadget Lab guy, Rob Beschizza. He does list what he believes are seven alternatives to the new Foleo, and there are some cool devices on that list. However, he badly misrepresents the Foleo by describing it as such,”…no hard drive, a new operating system, and a reliance on your phone’s connectivity.” It doesn’t need a hard drive, Linux is hardly a new OS, and it has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which means it is NOT dependent on your Treo to connect.

What Beschizza failed to mention, whether on purpose or not, was that while the device only sports 256MBs of RAM it also sports a CF card slot to which a minimum of 2GB can be attached, and likely much more. Rob also neglects to note that the Foleo features Opera 9, a very, very powerful web browser. While its not FireFox grade, its far better than Internet Exploder. Let’s not sell the Foleo short before it even hits the street, and besides, Rob’s alternatives are more than US$1,000 and most are over US$2,000. The Foleo will street at US$600.

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