As with a living specimen of some rare bird of flight, we can’t help but marvel when an unreleased gadget shows up in tact. You’ll remember that the Palm Foleo, the company’s not-quite-a-laptop Treo companion, was unceremoniously canceled following a wave of negative feedback from the blogosphere. Though it was never publicly released, the Foleo was almost mind-bogglingly close to hitting store shelves and we know for a fact that Palm seeded a few units to developers who signed non-disclosure agreements. And as you might expect, there are more than a few Foleos tucked away inside Palm headquarters. "I’ll probably still use mine," a Palm project manager told us not too long ago. "There’s still a good number of them floating around the Palm office."

That being the case, I suppose it’s not entirely shocking that one of the rare devices has fallen into the wrong hands. Gadget blog Gear Diary got their hands on a fully-boxed Foleo and did what any self-respecting tech blog would do: they promptly unboxed it. While there’s not too much of interest here, the author claims that "it’s nice to surf the Internet on so far," and goes on to state that "After playing with the Foleo off and on the last couple of days, I really believe this device could have competed with the Nokia based tablets that are out there in the consumer market."

For more on the Foleo that was never meant to be:
– see this unboxing from Gear Diary