My first thought when I read Palm’s press release today about its new Foleo Mobile Companion was: Damn, for less than what I’ve spent in the past year to keep my five year-old iBook running, I could have had a Foleo. My regret isn’t because the Foleo does more. On the contrary. It’s because it does less.

Like V-8, Foleo delivers your daily requirements — email, Web browsing, contacts, and document editing — on a 2.5 pound device (half the heft of the previously-noted iBook) with a full keyboard and a 10 inch screen (about the same as the iBook’s usable real estate).

Also like V-8, you get all of it in a much smaller, more palatable package. Not to mention cheaper. The Foleo’s initial price is $500, after a $100 rebate. Less than an Apple iPhone.

You could call Foleo a “subnotebook,” but Palm, wisely, isn’t doing that. (Consider what Wikipedia says about the category: “Subnotebooks are a niche IT product and rarely sell in large numbers.”) Instead, positioning Foleo as a mobile phone “companion” plants the device right dead center of the mainstream.

Today’s smartphone is the mobile computer that Palm envisioned when the company was founded 15 years ago. Right now smartphones can do everything my antique iBook can, and then some. And smartphones are way cheaper than computers, especially very lightweight computers.

“The smartphone will be the center of most people’s computing experience,” said Palm Founder Jeff Hawkins in a webcast today.

But while we want the phone to be smaller, there are some times when you need a keyboard and full-size display, as anyone who uses a phone for email can attest. Instead of replacing the phone, Foleo uses the phone as its mobile connection.

“Today there are 24 million people getting email on smartphones,” Hawkins said. “We first created the Foleo for them.”

In keeping with that mandate, Foleo does things in a simple and basic way. Basic applications are built-in. The Foleo syncs up automatically with the phone using Bluetooth. And everything works instantly, like picking up the phone. There are only two “states” — on and off.

The design is clean — no latches or lights. It’s small enough to be comfortably usable in a bus or on a plane. The top is rippled so it’s easy to grab with one hand. The keyboard is standard and the screen goes right to the edge. And Foleo has a true five-hour battery life that follows the cell phone model: charge it all night and use it all day. “When you’re in the airport you no longer have to sit on the floor,” is how Hawkins put it.

Foleo also has built-in WiFi, a USB port, video-out port, headphone jack, and slots for SD and compact flash cards for memory expansion. The device runs a Linux-based operating system, shielded from users with a GUI and the Opera Web browser, as well as a PDF viewer and editors for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Applications can be run stand-alone as well as synched with the phone.

There are no menu bars; instead Foleo has one-button access to basic applications. There’s an “apps” button for other applications, which presumably will be delivered from a menu. There’s no save, close, sleep, launch, shut down or resume modes — and no delays waiting for these operations. When you turn it off everything just stays the way it was when you left it.

When you want to read your email, you press the email button and the Foleo automatically connects to your email server via the phone. Your email appears on the screen instantly. Likewise Web browsing. Setting up the connection with your phone is a point-and-click operation.

Palm has opened up the architecture and is actively recruiting developers to build applications for the Foleo. The company expects to announce other productivity applications soon, for both stand-alone and synched modes. The device can’t handle video yet, but Palm plans to add that so we can watch those YouTube videos.

You do, of course, need a mobile phone and a data plan to use Foleo in synched mode. Initially, the device will work with Palm Treo phones running Palm OS or Windows Mobile and the company says that Foleo should work with any Windows Mobile phone with “little or no modification.” Palm plans to support RIM and Symbian devices as well as Apple iPhone, if Apple opens its device. “Our intention is to work with every smartphone,” said Hawkins.

So what’s not to like? Only one thing: Foleo won’t be available until sometime this summer. So I guess I’m going to put a few more miles on the iBook.

If you can’t wait to get a Foleo, sign up here to be notified when it hits the shelves.

Samsung is making a push into the U.S. enterprise networking market with its Ubigate iBG 2016 and iBG 3026 converged networking platforms. Introduced in Europe and Asia last year, the alone-in-one devices are aimed at small and mid-size companies and branch offices of large ones. The Ubigate looks like a competitor to the Cisco 1800 series.

Nokia debuted the Intellisync Call Connect for Cisco, a dual-mode device designed for the reality that most of us aren’t at our desks 40 percent of the time.

If you want to start watching Internet video on your living room TV, Earthlink’s Dinos Lambropoulos a good overview of the subject. One warning: it’s not for the tech-faint of heart.

Annoyed by those Ride of the Valkyries ringtones? Well get ready to be even more annoyed.

Emotive Communications of Los Angeles has contrived a new level of ringtone obnoxiousness with its “Push Ringer.” Emotive’s downloadable client lets callers send ringtones — which the company has dubbed “flingtones”— with a phone call.

The flingtone, which can be video, animations, avatars or flash files as well as audio, overrides the ringtone on the recipient’s phone. You can also record your own voice message as a ringtone. If you like the ringtone, you can order it on the spot.

The press release doesn’t specify what to do if you hate it. Or how to handle the ensuing social disaster caused by ill-considered voice message ringtones.

The first version of this was released in January for Skype as RingJacker. Versions for Symbian and Windows are expected later this year.

Emotive CEO Anthony Stonefield, who founded the ringtone company Moviso in the early 1990s, has described flingtones as a killer app for 3G and 4G phones. And he’s got some big name investors like Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Warner Music Group that apparently agree.

Yesterday I made my weekly WiFi Stations of the Cross, waiting for my son during his Japanese class.

My search for a wireless Internet connection every Monday has taken on inevitability of the via dolorosa.

There’s the Starbucks T-Mobile hotspot, but I refuse to pay $9.00 for an hour of connection. That works out to about $6,500 a month. For that money I could buy a house in a much better neighborhood than my own.

I could drive to downtown Mountain View to pick up Google’s free municipal WiFi network, but that’s almost as far as going home.

The pizzeria with the free MetroFi reception closed for lack of much business except mine. The other restaurant in the same strip mall has a spotty reception and the owner won’t open his network to patrons. Internet access isn’t his business, he says. (I might argue that customer service is, but what do I know? I’m just an impoverished journalist.)

So naturally, my figurative ears perked up when I saw the words “personal broadband” in a press release from Richardson, TX-based Navini Networks, a supplier of WiMax equipment and systems.

The fault, according to Paul Sergeant, Navini’s Director of Strategic Marketing — to paraphrase Shakespeare — is not in our connection but in our paradigm.

The prevailing model for wireless connectivity is that it’s essentially the same as that for wired connections.

“There has been a move to wireless broadband but it’s principally a fixed service delivered to a building,” he says. “What people really need is a broadband service delivered to you and that moves when you move around.”

Personal broadband isn’t really such a new idea as it is a new, more marketing-savvy name. Personal broadband from mobile phone carriers — EV-DO and its GSM-based cousin HSPA — has been around for a while.

But WiMax, Sergeant argues, is the technology that will make personal broadband commonplace.

“WiMax delivers speeds comparable to cable — one to ten MB/second — delivered over cellular ranges with cellular mobility,” he says.

Even more important, WiMax is IP technology from the ground up. CDMA and GSM data services are “cellular circuit voice with data bolted on the side,” Sergeant explains. “WiMax is all data. Voice is done via VoIP. Instead of data playing second fiddle, voice is one of many services.”

Navini is currently basing its Smart WiMax equipment on a pre-standard — but fully upgradeable, Sergeant assures — version of the proposed mobile WiMax standard 806.16e. “The standard does support QoS, it does all the voice prioritization so we can give voice the priority it needs.”

Finally, WiMax infrastructure is cheaper and more resilient, says Sergeant.

“During Hurricane Katrina all the cellular systems went down. Personal broadband goes down too, but it’s faster to set up. It’s smaller, cheaper, more portable, more robust because it’s built on IP.”

Sergeant should know. Navini supplied WiMax technology to Bell South in the aftermath of the hurricane to reconnect the carrier’s customers.

An obvious application for Navini’s technology is in the developing world where there is no legacy infrastructure. “In the developing world if people want voice it’s delivered over wireless, there’s no copper or fiber. And,” he adds, “IP is cheaper.”

Of course, no picture is entirely rosy. One of the challenges for WiMax, as for conventional cellular services, is that of dead spots. This is where Navini is counting on its secret sauce, which it calls Smart Beamforming.

“It’s like a flashlight,” explains Sergeant. “The energy is being directed exactly where you want, and as you move the beam moves with you.” The benefits are better mobility and coverage as well as higher throughput and, ultimately, lower cost networks.

When you add all this up, the cost to subscribers comes down around $40 a month — comparable to DSL or cable connections. In addition, multiple devices can use the same subscription, unlike EV-DO services, which charge $60 to $80 a month for a single device. “That lines up with our personal expectations for Internet service,” adds Sergeant.

After hearing all this, I was ready to sign up. But it turns out I’ll have to wait.

Currently about 50 service providers worldwide use Navini’s equipment currently.

In the U.S., personal broadband service is only available in a few cities including New Orleans and Lubbock, TX, and will be available in Chicago and Washington D.C. by year end. In 2008, Sergeant expects Dallas, Denver and San Francisco to join the party, but ubiquitous service is probably two to four years away.

One city that is deploying mobile WiMax on a large scale is Sydney, Australia. Navini customer Unwired Australia is the city’s number one broadband service in terms of net additions, according to Sergeant. “With students and under-35s it’s by far the biggest,” he says. “It’s the same people who don’t have landlines, just cell.”

Maybe I should move to Australia. It might be cheaper than paying all those $9 connection charges to T-Mobile.

Judging from the e-blizzard of press releases coming out of CTIA, you could spend from now until next year trying out all the new stuff available on the “third screen.”

Here are a few items that caught my attention.

Maybe not the sexiest application, but a strong contender in my book for the most useful is Fremont, CA-based ABBYY’s Business Card Recognition (BCR) utility for smartphone Symbian, S60 or UIQ platforms. The software captures data from business cards using the built-in digital camera, extracting contact information from the image directly to the telephone address book.

Another interesting product is Telular’s Wireless PATH (Premise Access Transport Hub) that lets you use cellular networks instead of conventional wired networks for voice calls, high-speed data transmission and faxes. The company is promoting the PATH to “enable rapid deployment of wireless services in emergency or disaster situations, and when business operations are disrupted.” I for one would be happy to have a pocket-sized version that I can take on the road.

Motorola’s new MC35 Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA - new acronym alert☺) adds a barcode reader to the growing suite of mobile applications. This makes mobile data entry simpler by eliminating the need for special purpose devices.

Atlanta-based Firemobile aims to unchain online banking from your PC. Now in addition to yakking on the phone while you’re sitting in a restaurant or walking down the street, you can also check your account balance and make your mortgage payment.

If you’re stuck in traffic you’ll be interested in INRIX Traffic for Windows Mobile devices. The service delivers real-time and predictive traffic conditions on Windows Mobile devices in about 60 U.S. metropolitan markets, with additional markets planned in the coming months.

If you get caught in a traffic jam anyway, fastmobile will help you stay on top of email with its push email that lets you receive, reply to and send email from a handset. Currently available for MetroPCS subscribers, fastmobile also lets users save and sort messages and synchronize email accounts.

Don’t feel like checking email? You could use the time to do some “photo flirting” with FunMobility Flirt Pix service, a cross-carrier application that lets subscribers view photos and exchange visual messages anonymously.

Motorola makes it easier to listen to music in your car with the Automotive Music & Hands-free System T605 car kit that streams music from a Bluetooth phone directly through your car’s sound system. Available only through Verizon, the system puts phone calls through the sound system as well, pausing the music while you take the call.

Finally, San Jose, CA-based Pinger this week expanded its voice messaging service to include most US mobile customers and Blackberry users. The company has also expanded the service to allow members to ping anyone’s mobile phone, regardless of whether the person is a Pinger member.

Now, just don’t get into an accident while you’re doing all this stuff on your phone.