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Palm is back and it's tiny.
The new Palm smartphone–the company and the product are just "Palm"–is a small Android phone designed to offer you a more portable and less troublesome alternative to your main Verizon smartphone. This is part of a potential trend of anti-distraction devices which I am very happy at the moment, although its strange sales strategy (you must also have another phone available Verizon) may limit its appeal.
And … it's Palm. While the new Palm, a start-up formed of former ex-Samsung and FrogDesign with money and TCL support, has nothing to do with the company that designed the PalmPilot and webOS, the brand still has a lot of power for older technicians. It is synonymous with ease, simplicity, clarity and vision. It also means relentless strategic difficulties, but he has never been accused of not being brave.
"You have the following and you have a passion for what the brand originally represented," said Dennis Miloseski, founder of New Palm. "But you have a generation of people who have never experienced Palm, so we'd like to see how the brand can be reinvented in the right way."
An extra small phone
First, the phone itself. The Palm Palm is a small diamond powered by Android with a screen of 1312 x 3320 inches. Given the physical size of the screen, it results in an incredibly high of 445 pixels per inch. It measures 3.8 x 2.0 x 0.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.2 ounces. It is mainly black, with a silver or gold entourage. It costs $ 349 and is scheduled for release in November.
This is a lot of specifications. The key here is how you feel, and you feel … fun. There is finally a phone that goes into your back pocket or your pocket money. There is an armband for that, and it is waterproof, so you can swim it.
But also, being small, it is less immersive than your standard smartphone. It's less seductive. That's the goal.
"Our smartphones have become tablets and supercomputers," Miloseski said. "We're not engaging in coffee shops anymore, we're not connected to the real world, we're fascinated by technology."
The user interface looks more like the Apple Watch than Android–it's a drop-down menu of application icons that you can exploit. Because the screen resolution is correct, the applications are well formatted. There is a standard Android window shade for quick settings and a full application drawer at the bottom. The touch keyboard is as big as possible on this small device, although Palm encourages you to use voice input with Google Assistant.
The body is minimalist. There is no headphone jack. you are supposed to use a wireless headset. There are not even volume buttons, although you can remap the power button to control the volume, if using the volume control on the window blind makes you too much nervous.
Palm has been thinking about what people really need from their phone when they are out. The cameras are a big problem, so you have to put 12MP main cameras and 8MP front cameras.
Under the hood, the Palm uses Android 8.1 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 with an X9 LTE modem supporting all Verizon tapes. When we say that it is a Verizon exclusivity, it is a Verizon physical exclusivity: the nano – SIM inside does not make it so. is not removable and it is only Verizon.
The device has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. It does not have a microSD card reader because you do not watch video or play sophisticated games, and 32GB can hold a lot of music. There is no fingerprint sensor, so you will need to use the face unlock. And this will rely on LTE technology because it is limited to Wi-Fi technology at 2.4 GHz, which is often slow and cluttered.
The 800mAh battery is a problem, and I think that largely explains why it is used as a secondary device. It offers 3 hours and 20 minutes of talk time, about five and a half hours of LTE streaming music and about eight hours of typical use with its lifestyle disabled.
About this lifestyle: Is there a way to move using a very small battery, an anti-digital distraction feature or both? Probably both. It disables the phone's radios when the screen is turned off even though you can make sure that certain notifications are broadcast. This prolongs the life of the battery and prevents the Pavlovian bling-bling-bling reaction we all have.
"What the lifestyle is alluding to is that you value your human relationships and things that are real, and that technology can help them support them in the opposite way," he said. declared Miloseski.
The phone has a surprisingly powerful speaker for a tiny device and the call quality is excellent.
"I think we are entering a world where the voice is the first," Miloseski said hopefully.
A memorable name
Palm vs. Palm
If you're not familiar with Palm, it was the definitive mark of the first era of handheld computing in the 1990s. Palm PDAs were the first affordable and usable handhelds. They eventually evolved to become the Palm Treos, the first consumer smartphones. The company, however, staggered in the mid-2000s on an old story: it was struggling to update its 90's operating system for a more connected world. But he had a good idea.
When the Palm Pre smartphone appeared in 2009, it was an absolute revelation. Palm's WebOS was more advanced than the Android of its day, and for a second was considered the real potential competitor of Apple. (This helped that the palm of the time was largely run by former Apple employees.) The edgeDieter Bohn, perhaps the biggest webOS fan in the world, points out In 2011, WebOS offered a gestural interface, wireless charging, card multitasking and a ton of other features that took five years for its competitors to adopt.
But Palm was mismanaged grotesquely. He could only make Sprint a carrier partner and Palm and Sprint staff never got along. By the time webOS started, the company was sold to HP, which suffered a series of painful and ridiculous changes for the CEO and abandoned the entire project. Finally, HP sold the brand to TCL, maker of Alcatel and BlackBerry smartphones, in 2014, and TCL has been in business for four years.
Dennis Miloseski and Howard Nuk, founders of New Palm, were looking for the idea of a small quasi-smartphone in Silicon Valley and had a conversation with TCL, who was looking for a link with this Palm brand. The ideas have meshed and TCL has decided to license the Palm name at startup without a name and build its phone.
This is an important point–This is not a TCL phone, not like Alcatel phones. And it's not really a Palm phone in the sense of continuity with Palm, although there is a huge Easter egg in the user interface for Palm fans. Swipe up from the bottom and you can access the application shortcuts by erasing a letter form in a separate Graffiti style text input box.
A less disturbing world?
The world is getting nervous and I am overwhelmed for about a year, but at the same time, I am addicted to my smartphone. Do not judge me too harshly; I am like the proverbial gastronomic critic. But I've tried to keep an eye on new devices that allow people to stay connected, while lightening a bit of the wire of continuous notifications.
Republic Wireless's screenless relay is one of them – it connects you to your family. Punkt's MP 02 premium voice phone is another. Now, this one is a third. I hope that there is a trend here.
My fear is that costs get in the way–that having a less entertaining world, strangely, will become the province of the rich. The Punkt and Palm devices cost $ 349 each, about $ 200 more than many readers ask me to pay for simpler phones.
This is unfortunately not very intuitive, because you think that things simpler and smaller should cost less. Unfortunately, as I explained Punkt, the big screen smartphones bring considerable economies of scale.–it is currently cheaper to make a rotten Android 5 inch slab than to create a well-designed LTE voice phone.
The character and marketing of Palm continue on this theme. Miloseski and Nuk seem to be massive hipsters, and the marketing is filled with attractive and affluent young people who take out their Palm phones for a night out. If the Punkt concept is about a 50-year-old company executive who can picnic with his family without being on Slack, the Palm concept is for Brooklyn residents aged 20-25 who are doing Active Life Stuff without being dragged into play at Alphabears.
To appeal to this market, the Palm has to be cool, and I think so. I mean, I do not know how cool, but it's a tiny jewel with a user interface that looks like watchOS, and that will come with a range of leather cases including a tiny Kate Spade wallet.
Neither Kin nor kind
The Palm phone is a very small smartphone that you are supposed to use as a secondary phone. Here is the strangest part: you can only buy it as a secondary phone. You must already have a main Verizon line to use it. It only works on a special SIM card called NumberShare, which synchronizes your number on the device. The phone costs $ 349, or $ 17.04 per month, plus $ 10 per month for a service above your existing Verizon service line.
This is a fully functional smartphone, remember. This is not a Bluetooth headset or any kind of accessory device. The need to have a main phone is more conceptual (and financial?) Than technological.
The Palm works much better with an Android phone than with an iPhone, because of iMessage. If you have a primary Android phone, you can sync your same Google account, download all your key apps, and get your texts on the Palm phone. If you use iMessage, you're screwed.
By meeting guys from Palm and Verizon, I joked about how a $ 650 smartphone equals the price of an iPhone XS. Now, Verizon just needs to offer a very good android smartphone at $ 650. The carrier has a big gap between the Moto Z3 at $ 480 and the LG G7 at $ 750 in its lineup.
I have a long memory and Verizon's strategy for the Palm phone reminds me a bit too much of Verizon's other convicted product, the Microsoft Kin. The Kin was an SMS phone that Verizon murdered by charging him a monthly fee, like a smartphone.
Verizon assured me that there was absolutely nothing in common between this experience and this one. (Natch.) But what they have in common, it's a very un-intuitive plan pricing. The fact that it can not be sold as a stand-alone device is so, very strange, that I'm afraid it's preventing people from buying it.
We will have the Palm phone in November. Then come back for a complete exam.
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