We hand down judgments all too quickly in the digital age. Let a new product be announced and bloggers have proclaimed it a hit or a miss within the day. Then we columnists weigh in with our analyses before actual hardware is in the hands of end users.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but two recent announcements have me pondering. The implications of a product can be more important than its sales, and our focus on market success can mask significant developments.

Palm's new Foleo is a case in point. Boiled down to its essentials, Foleo is a small laptop with a 10-inch screen that runs Linux and is seen as a companion to a "smart phone" such as Palm's own Treo. It comes with the Opera Web browser for use over a WiFi connection, runs five hours on a battery charge and synchronizes data such as e-mail and contacts -- no calendar appointments -- with phones running either Windows Mobile or Palm's own operating system.

The reaction to Foleo has been largely negative, with critics bemoaning its underpowered processor and questioning why anyone would choose the device over a conventional laptop.

But at $499, the Foleo has little competition. Ultra-portable laptops are out there but cost considerably more than the average laptop, which costs somewhere close to $900. Moreover, because it uses flash memory, Foleo is up and running quickly without a long boot-up.

This might not be the product to do it, but Foleo heralds a change in computing style, and I'll wager that small devices like it coupled with fast Internet connections will leave smart phones in the dust. The problem with combining cell phones with PDAs is that you're dealing with tiny screens and absurd button keyboards that make serious work a challenge. When the smart-phone craze passes (the iPhone might be its crest), we'll see higher-quality cell phones built less like Swiss Army knives and more like communications devices.

And along with them, we'll re-evaluate what we need in mobile computing tools. With more and more data on the Internet, we'll need vast laptop storage space less than a reliable Net connection.

We're learning that Internet applications can be optimized to work offline when needed (the new Google Gears offering does just this, and others will follow). So all we'll need is a small but workable screen, a sound keyboard for sending e-mail and Web surfing, and a solid operating system.

No, I'd say it's far too early to rush to judgment on Foleo without seeing what it portends.

We'd better be careful, too, not to dismiss serious attempts to explore new user interfaces. Microsoft has just announced Surface, a technology that takes computing out of the monitor and puts it on flat surfaces such as tabletops or walls. The screen is the computer in this scenario, every bit of it accessible by touch. But rather than a simple touch screen, Surface offers a highly sophisticated interaction that supports multiple users and complex operations.

Think about sorting photographs. Instead of using a mouse to select images or dragging and dropping them on your desktop, you'll use your hands to move them around the screen as if you were handling actual photographs on a table.

Use your fingers to enlarge or contract the photo, rotating it as necessary in your work. Choose from a palette of retouching effects and apply them with your fingers or -- and this is fun to watch -- use an actual brush to "paint" them on.

It looks like magic, but Surface uses fairly conventional components, including a standard video card, a fast Pentium 4 processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM and a projector in the table that houses the display. Add five cameras that can pick up motion on the surface and feed information on their movement back to the computer. Also add infrared capabilities for talking to devices such as digital cameras or audio players and a set of stereo speakers for sound.

You wind up with the ability to work with data in provocative new ways in an interface that leaves the conventional keyboard and mouse behind. Microsoft is focusing on public spaces with this technology, including restaurants, hotels and casinos.

Given the $10,000 cost, that's understandable, and it might take years for a device such as Surface to get into home applications.

But shaking up our idea of user input and extending the touch screen is healthy for the industry and might lead to intriguing innovations down the road.

Perceptive Pixel (www.perceptivepixel.com) is also involved in this space, and its brief demo, along with Microsoft's (www.microsoft.com/surface), will render some of these concepts concrete. The significant thing, though, isn't whether either of these companies brings a successful product out of this work. Rather, it is the business opportunities that will result from changing our work habits to accommodate powerful new capabilities.

The question to be resolved about any new product is not only how many will sell, but how it will influence what happens down the road.

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