The new Palm is a tiny phone to get you away from your phone

There is a new phone with the word "Palm" on it which is tiny, intriguing and has very little to do with Palm other than this word printed on the back. It comes from a startup in San Francisco, which bought the name rights to TCL last year. It costs $ 349.99 and will be available in November, but you can not buy it alone. It is only available as an add-on to a current line. In addition, Steph Curry is somehow involved.

It's a weird little thing.

The Palm phone is a device that you can add to your Verizon plan and share your phone number. This is a phone designed for you to use on weekends, when you go out at night or just when you want to be a little less distracted by your big phone with all its applications. That said, it runs a full version of Android 8.1 and all apps from the Google Play Store.

So, to review: it's a tiny phone that prevents you from using your big phone, but it can do anything your big one can do if you want (but you should not, because the very idea is to get you to be a little less obsessed with your phone). It's like a phone for your phone. And Steph Curry helped design holsters so you could attach it to your forearm during your workouts. There are also Kate Spade's claws.

As I said: weird. But also: fascinating.

Let's go back. Some people try not to be too attached to their phone. We have new settings and software to track and show us our usage, but they are easy to ignore. There is also a tendency for each phone to become bigger and bigger.

Some people try to get around both problems by buying a "minimalist phone", something that can call and send SMS. But you end up with a lot of problems when you do it. Have you just completely abandoned having a smartphone? This is not really an option for most people. Do you find a stupid phone – like the Light Phone – that does not just enough to cover your needs? Chances are, there will also be one thing you want this phone to do.

If you want a less troublesome phone, you may want to use it without giving up your big smartphone when you need it.

This is the idea of ​​the new Palm phone. It's a side-car for your phone. You should almost think of it more as a thing to get in the place of a connected watch than as a second phone. In fact, considering it as a smart watch is a good choice, because it is exactly how Verizon (and only Verizon) sells it: a complement to existing plans. You can not just buy the thing alone or unlocked as your main phone.

On one side, getting a second phone to help you get out of your main phone is an obviously ridiculous idea. But then, this idea puts you in the head. Yes, I would like to go to the booth and just have a little phone I know I will not blow myself up with work emails. Yes, having a tiny phone that will fit in my pocket and weighs almost nothing seems great.

It might be a more elegant solution to having a "profitable" phone than choosing a simple Jane phone or saving a Kickstarter for an in-bee phone. But even if the Palm phone solves a lot of "second phone" problems, that does not mean it does not cause a lot of complications.

Before entering all this, however, this thing is still a phone. And there is a lot to say after a few hours of play with last week. (We'll go to Steph Curry too.)

The new Palm phone looks nothing like a very new iPhone X. Its designers claim that they did not target that. Instead, their design goals, consisting of creating a small phone that felt comfortable and hidden in your hands, led to the form. But still, look at him.

Gorilla Glass 3 at the front and back is designed for IP68 protection against water and dust. A single button – the power button – serves several purposes. It contains only a battery of 800 mAh, but it is more than enough to feed it a long time, so much is small.

It is obviously tiny; Measuring only 50 x 97 millimeters, it is not much bigger than a credit card, but is thicker at 7.4 mm. It nestles in your hand so you instantly get nostalgic of the good old days of smaller phones. It weighs 62.5 grams and it is easy to believe that you would forget that this thing was in your pocket.

Being so small, there is no room for a headphone jack or for wireless charging; it has a single USB-C port. And yes, it will be one more thing that you have to keep charged.

This is not a very powerful phone, by design. It has a tiny 3.3-inch, 445-dpi LCD that's big enough to check information and tap, but not big enough to make you want to do a real job on it. The rear camera measures 12 megapixels and the pictures taken are passable, but not great. An 8 megapixel selfie camera is also available.

The Palm phone has a processor that we have already seen on other low-end phones – the Snapdragon 435 – coupled with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. If you know the Android specs, you probably know that it's not very powerful – but because this phone is so small, there are fewer pixels to drive and so it's pretty fast when I tried.

Palm (and yes, it's very odd for me to talk about this company as "Palm") has made many software changes to improve the running of Android 8.1 on a small screen and make sure that he will do his job better. to distract you.

There is only one virtual button at the bottom. You press it once to go back, twice to go home and long press to access the multitasking screen. Since there are no volume buttons, you must drag the quick setup panel down to adjust it. And since there was no fingerprint sensor, Palm created a custom face-unlocking feature using the 8-megapixel front camera. I can not say how secure it is, but my idea is that a traditional PIN would be much safer. The power button will launch Google Assistant. you long press on it for that.

Instead of the traditional home screen configuration and list of apps on most Android phones, the Palm phone only has a vertical scrolling hex grid. If you long press one of the icons, you will get a large window containing the shortcuts available for this application. (Application shortcuts are one of the most underutilized features of Android.)

The only real gesture I could find with the original Palm (apart from the fact that this new phone is as small as a Veer or a Pixi) is what happens when you do swipe your finger from the home screen. It displays a list of applications on an area where you can draw a letter to search. It resembles worldwide graffiti areas on older PalmOS devices, with four application icons in the corners.

But no: this is not a phone appreciably inspired by PalmOS or webOS. This company took the name. They spoke at length about their philosophy and this is interesting, but they talked about "reinventing" a Palm philosophy rather than bringing it back.

The lifestyle is at the heart of this philosophy (or, because the founders are dads, the dad hashtag mode.) More than any other feature, the lifestyle on the Palm phone is what makes it a "time past Well to "Minimalist Phone." When you activate the lifestyle by tapping a palm-shaped icon, a set of Do Not Disturb and Low Battery settings is enabled.

In Life mode, your notifications are of course disabled, but Palm also turns off wireless mode. radios. Cellular and Wi-Fi radios will only turn on when the display is on. (Bluetooth will also be disabled, but stay on if you're connected to a headset.) It's a much more aggressive way to disable notifications and deny incoming phone calls. Palm specifies the phone after eight hours of normal use without the activated lifestyle. Therefore, if you switch it, the Palm phone should take a very long time with a charge.

Oddly, the Palm phone does not run the latest version of Android, which incorporates many Digital Wellbeing features. The company told me that it did not want to clash with these features of Android 9 Pie. Maybe an update will come in the future, but it's a lack

Here is the other thing to know about the Palm phone: it's really a Verizon phone. From the way it is sold to the software it contains, to the wide range of accessories developed for its launch, it carries the carrier's fingerprints.

For people who know something about Palm, the Verizon partnership is a profound and rich irony. Verizon rejected the first Palm Pre and sent it to the purgatory sprint at launch. Verizon also launched a bit of bait for Palm suggesting it strongly support the Pre Plus, and then pay full attention and marketing budget to the Motorola Droid.

Whatever the case may be, the Palm phone is preloaded with a handful of Verizon apps, but not as much as you expect. The main of them is the Verizon Message + app for sending SMS. It's a terrible application that comes with a lot of scary advertising "Features" and one truly deadly feature: It automatically syncs text messages across multiple phones with the same phone number.

Verizon's NumberShare feature is the hub that powers the Palm phone. It becomes an "extension" device on your primary phone, sharing its phone number. This allows calls and texts to pass. The Palm phone is designed primarily for Android users – iPhone users could use it but since the Palm phone is an Android phone itself, they habit get their iMessages on this device.

You may also know that it's a jam at Verizon because the Palm phone is launched with a vast array of accessories: cases, lanyards, armbands, Kate Spade clutches. There is a surprising amount of money in the phone cases and Verizon surely wants to make sure he gets it.

That brings us to Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors, director of the company's creative strategy. Palm says that he is not paid to do this job but that he is rather an investor. His main contribution has been to develop props, they say, and he will also be involved in marketing. Palm insists that he's been "put to work" by testing accessories and that he's not just a leading creative director in the sense of Alicia Keys, of Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, Nick Cannon and will.i.am.

Curry has already appeared in commercials for Apple and Vivo. Most of his Recent tweets came from an iPhone.

I report on the original Palm phones since the early 2000s, starting with my days at TreoCentral and through PreCentral, It's my neighbor, and The edge. I've met my wife because of an obsession shared with Palm devices. I have run the largest online Palm community. I have a drawer full of old Palm devices (some of which have never been released) and still pop off on Twitter how its innovations foreshadowed many of the "new" features of smartphones. So when I say that this new Palm phone looks nothing like the old Palm phones. I speak from experience.

The history of Palm is largely unknown and largely forgotten, but nevertheless deeply related to the products we use today. The Palm design informed the smartphone that you are currently using. Palm engineers work in large companies that make products you interact with every day.

This new Palm phone is not connected directly to this. No Palm employee works in the new Palm and far beyond the fact that the old Palm was the last company to really seriously strive to sell tiny smartphones, this new Palm phone does not have much to do with the software aesthetics of the old Palm. Even the new Palm logo does nothing to evoke the old Palm.

I'm not angry about this because this new Palm phone has its own fascinating ideas. Is this product a luxury? Absolutely. This is a phone only for people who already have a phone. Nevertheless, the idea of ​​having a tiny phone that could lead you to stop being extremely online is compelling.

I do not know if this new Palm phone is the right way to achieve this goal, but I'm happy to see some companies willing to try something different with smartphones, something other than making them bigger and more powerful.

And hey, if this new Palm phone does not sell, it would be a very Palm thing to do.