Palm today announced a smart phone companion product today called Foleo. The Foleo will connect via Bluetooth to a Treo device running either the Palm operating system or Windows Mobile. It has a relatively large screen and full-sized keyboard to help users edit e-mail and office documents.
It delivers web access with your smartphone or WiFi making the connection (YouTube video).
When you’re in a café, airport or hotel with Wi-Fi, the Palm Foleo will take advantage of hotspots. Out of Wi-Fi range? With the built-in Bluetooth, you can also access the web anywhere you have phone coverage.
The Foleo runs Linux, has a 10.2-inch screen, and a full-sized keyboard. Battery life is five hours of real-world use, Palm’s Jeff Hawkins says. It starts automatically — there’s no such thing as booting it, sleep mode, or hibernation. It’s got an e-mail button that takes you to e-mail that’s an exact replica of the mail on your phone (which doesn’t have to be a Treo, he says).
Foleo will be available this summer for $599; $499 after a $100 rebate. It will be available online and in Palm stores initially–it doesn’t need to be sold through phone carriers.
Palm’s Jeff Hawkins unveiled the Foleo today at the Wall Street Journal’s D conference in Carlsbad, California.
Jeff Hawkins (audio interview), of Palm Pilot fame, wrote the book “On Intelligence“and started a company called Numenta to apply neuroscience to computing. Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Labs (LMT), is talking with Numenta about “cognitive computing” for DARPA projects involving UAVs.
Lockheed Martin initiated a two-year, $6.6-million study contract to develop a Polymorphous Computing Agent Architecture (PCAA) that will perform cognitive tasks for military systems.
The neocortex is a memory system, according to Hawkins.
All the brain does is store and recall patterns. Every sensory input — whether sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell — is translated into a sequence of patterns that is stored in the neocortex. “Through exposure,” Hawkins explained, “it builds a model of the world. If you step off a plane in a new city and walk through the terminal, your brain will compare that terminal to others you’ve been to before and will predict that when your foot hits the carpet it will encounter a firm surface that will support your weight. If your foot slips through the carpet and you fall into a vat of chocolate pudding, you will be surprised. If the carpet sprouts tentacles and grabs your leg, you will be surprised. If anything happens that is not consistent with your past experience of carpets in terminals, you will be surprised.
That’s because your brain is always predicting what will happen next based on what has happened in the past. The last time you were in a terminal, your foot hit the carpet, then you took another step, and another, and another, all without incident. Similarly, when you hear the opening bars of a familiar song, your brain anticipates what notes will come next because it is comparing what it hears to the stored pattern of the entire song. Intelligence, then, is pattern recognition. The brain is intelligent, Hawkins said, because “it lets you imagine the future.”
A recent development at Tel-Aviv University could bring us one step closer to storing rudimentary memories on a manmade device, says Eureka Alert. Reportedly, a new experiment created memories “in an artificial culture of live neurons.”
