Palm’s Foleo has officially been cancelled, but another Foleo is definitely coming, except for the fact that we don’t know (and Palm doesn’t either) when’s that going to happen. And if it’s going to happen….

The decision comes even before the product’s launch, which signals that the consumers’ feedback was so disappointing that the project had to be dropped in order not to embarrass Palm even more.

Foleo was supposed to be a Linux-based laptop with a Wi-Fi module, a USB port, video-out port, headphone jack, and slots for SD and compact flash cards for memory expansion. Weighing 2lbs, with a 10.2 in screen and a five hour battery life, it was meant as a companion for Palm’s Treo handheld, which should have facilitated the viewing and editing of e-mails and common documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. Besides working with Treo, Foleo was also compatible with Windows Mobile-powered devices and Palm was also preparing full Blackberry, Symbian and even Mac OSX support.

But the latest post from Palm’s official blog announced the sad disappearance of the gadget, even before it was born:

“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 our 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,” said Ed Colligan, CEO at Palm.

The news comes as a sad exitus of the disappointing mini-laptop, described by Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm, as “the most exciting product I have ever worked on.” Palm initially targeted heavy users of wireless e-mail who are looking for a portable device to ease the burden of relying on a smart phone as a primary computing device. However, the UMPC (ultra-mobile-PC) was endowed with an underpowered processor that would have made video-playback a torment for the battery and the viewer, although it did allow users to surf the Web with Opera-mini browser over a built-in Wi-Fi connection.

“Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first,” added Colligan.

Palm’s move will cost them about $10 million, which might not be too much for other companies but for Palm, which is struggling to regain its former crown in the mobile world that is quite significant. “This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders.”

After thanking the developers who have worked at the Foleo project, Colligan concluded: “I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.”

The “renewed focus” means that Palm will concentrate on a next-generation software platform, with “a modern, flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment.”

Foleo’s road ends here after numerous critics coming from all sides. Todd Kort, an analyst with Gartner, described the $499 ultra-portable laptop as “probably the most disappointing product I've seen in several years. To think that anyone would carry something with a 10-inch display at 2.5 pounds as an adjunct to a phone just doesn't make any sense to me.”