"Does it remind you of the Foleo?" Palm's never-released "smartphone companion" laptop, killed on the eve of its introduction last September, does look a bit like Apple's new MacBook Air, though the latter is thinner yet and far more powerful. Under the casings, there's little comparison. Which raises a question: Did Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who's now Palm's executive chairman, get some inkling that Apple would be coming out with the MacBook Air?

Were you actually looking forward to the release of the Foleo, Palm's underpowered Linux laptop meant to be a companion to its Treo smartphones? Crushed that it was cancelled? Relive the Foleo's brief glory days thanks to this clip of Jeff Hawkins demonstrating the device on AllThingsD.com.

For years now, Palm cofounder Jeff Hawkins has been promising his company will come up with "a new product category" — some leap of the imagination, akin to the original PalmPilot handheld organizer, that will define an entirely new submarket of gadgets. The Treo smartphone was, genuinely, such an advance. And the way Hawkins talked up the Foleo, the lightweight, underpowered Linux laptop he revealed at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year, you'd have thought it, too, was a real breakthrough. Hawkins may have fooled himself, but he fooled no one else, including, at long last, Palm's own management. Palm is taking a $10 million charge against earnings to cancel the development of Foleo — and this on the eve of its release.