The Best HP Palm PRE PIXI Reviews & Buzz Update News Information

Deal of the Day: Palm Pre Phone – $79.99 (84% off)

2009-12-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

Posted: 07 Dec 2009 10:48 AM PST

Amazon.com currently offers the Palm Pre at only $79.99 with the purchase of a 2-year contract with Sprint. Please note that Sprint currently offers the phone for $150 under the same conditions. The Pre is an awesome little piece of hardware that has many of the same features as the iPhone, but with the addition of a physical keyboard.

[Pal Pre Phone (Sprint) - $79.99 (With a 2-year contract)]

Related posts:

Palm Pixi Phone (Sprint)

2009-12-07T22:38:00.001-08:00

Palm Pixi Phone (Sprint)

Overall the phone is great. It is very small and light and you forget it's in the front pocket of your trousers. The speed is the same as the Palm Pre. Multi-tasking is slower than the pre if you have more than 3 programs runnign at the same time but this shouldn't happen often. The screen is very small and you must expand your page to read anything on the web. The keys on the keyboard take soem getting used to sicen they are so small. I love the size and this was the sellign point. My second choice would have been an HCT Hero with Google Android installed.

In my family, we have 2 WebOS phones. I have the Pre and my son has the Pixi. As a result, I was able to make some videos comparing the relative performance of these devices. Here's a link to a playlist of the reviews:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=943798F8E22C971F&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL

What I've found in comparing the two devices is that they provide generally similar performance, despite several other reviewers who claim the Pixi is slower than the Pre.

If I did not already have a Pre, I would have to think hard about a Pixi considering the performance. However, since I already have a Pre, I would find it difficult to live without Wifi and with a camera that didn't produce as nice of pictures as the Pre. So I won't be switching. But for the price, the Pixi is a fantastic first smartphone.
As a Pre owner and user, I understand the power of the WebOS multitasking. It truly blows everything else out of the water in the speed of getting things done. The iPhone feels like walking in quicksand after this.

I expected the Pixi to be slower than the Pre. It isn't. For some things it is faster. Word Whirl on both devices feels exactly the same. This is an extremely light and small smart phone. It feels great in the hand and the keyboard is one of the better I've used in the past years.

While I now own both, I will primarily use my Pre for two reasons: Camera and WiFi. The Camera on the Pixi is better than Centro and about equal to many cell phones. The resolution difference (2 vs 3 MP) doesn't mean anything to me. The issue is with the light sensitivity of the sensor. The Pre is much better. Since my home location is right on the border of good Sprint data, WiFi is a requirement.

If I was always in a good data coverage, I would be hard pressed to not choose the Pixi over the Pre. It is a cool phone. You won't get more functionality for under $30.

Technical Details

3G-enabled smartphone with intuitive Palm webOS platform, touchscreen and full QWERTY keyboard; easy integration with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and more
Sprint Mobile Broadband Network via EV-DO connectivity; GPS turn-by-turn directions via Sprint Navigation; Sprint TV enabled; download music from Amazon MP3 Store
8 GB internal memory; 2-megapixel camera/camcorder; Bluetooth stereo music; access to personal and corporate email
Up to 5 hours of talk time, up to 350 hours (14.5 days) of standby time
What's in the Box: handset, rechargeable battery, charger, USB cable, quick start guide, user manual

Palm Pixi Phone (Sprint)

Palm Pixi First Impressions and Hands-On Video

2009-12-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

By Dieter Bohn | Wednesday, Sep 9, 2009 | 72 comments »

[ youtube link ]

Above, a rough and ready, very short video of the Pixi. Honestly, Palm has never let us take photos or videos of devices at briefings like this before, so I came a little unprepared. Flip MinoHD: Thank you.

After the break, my stream-of-consciousness first impressions after an hour with the Pixi

Hardware & Aesthetics

First off: the Palm Pixi is thin, so thin you want to bite it. It's light, too, clocking in at just under 100 grams with the standard back cover, just over with the touchstone cover. It's so thin and light it floats in your hand. If the back cover weren't a slightly grippy, soft touch plastic, it would float right out of your hand. It's thinner than the iPhone 3Gs. Thinner than any BlackBerry by a noticeable margin (Palm says 20%). It disappears in your pocket, I mean you put it in there and it's solid gone.

So yeah, I like that aspect of the Pixi.

Overall, it's a little narrow and a little tall, but not too bad. I was initially worried that I would find the screen too small - it's 320x400 instead of 320x480, but in practice it really doesn't matter too much for most apps - the webOS is all HTML anyway, so it can handle multiple screensizes just fine. Screen responsiveness is just like you'd like it to be on a capacitive screen: great.

Build quality on the units Palm had on hand was great. The plastic on the front is hard and glossy - essentially the same feel as the front of the Pre. The overall look of the front of the device does feel a bit off, but a large part of that is my smartphone-center wondering where the main buttons between the keyboard and the screen are. Does the Pixi look high-end? Not really, but it doesn't look especially cheap either. With a classy custom back cover, it can turn heads.

Speaking of the gesture area - mark me down as ok with the jettisoning of the center button. You can still tap there if the phone is on for the same action, but the whole thing feels much more fluid without it. Replacing the circular leds with a single, thin band of light also classes the rig up a bit.

The Keyboard: passable, but very small. It's slightly narrower than the Pre's keyboard, but still larger than the teensy keyboard on the Centro. Size aside (and I know that size will be an issue), the keyboard feels much better than the Pre's keyboard. The keys click in much more satisfyingly and much more responsively.

Removing the back cover is an exercise in frustration, so hopefully the battery life is good - it uses the exact same battery as the Pre, so we'll see.

Responsiveness, Performance, & Speed

Palm Pixi Special Coverage

We don't know just how much RAM is in here nor do we know how well the Pixi's Qualcomm processor will handle under stress, but basically as long as you keep it to three to four cards, you're going to do just fine. More than 5 or 6 and you're asking for heaps of trouble. Fact: the Pixi isn't as powerful as the Pre.

It's EVDO Rev A, so speeds are as good as Sprint is in your area, I certainly didn't notice it taking any longer to render web pages than the Pre does. The removal of WiFi feels like a classless move - I don't know what a WiFi chip costs or how much it would cost to make it work well with the new Qualcomm chipset, but somehow it feels like they're just making sure that everybody knows that the Pixi is low-end.

Overall

I tell you: I am sorely tempted by the Pixi. Yes, it's not as powerful as the Pre. Yes, it lacks WiFi. Yes, it has a smaller screen. But the always-there keyboard and the blissfully tiny size are compelling. I probably won't switch because of those three issues, but honestly I don't envy the decision a future buyer will have to make if he or she doesn't care much about one of those three things.

Centro owners will flock to this thing like you won't believe.

iPhone 3Gs vs. Palm Pixi

2009-12-07T21:41:00.000-08:00

Palm appears to be releasing a device that has all the perks and sexiness of Palm Pre’s webOS functionality (what I consider by far the most advanced mobile OS on the planet) but with the solidity of design of past Palm winners (Treos, Centro). I’ve had my own Palm Pre Complaints, even to the point of my having to return my Palm Pre to the Sprint Store. The vast majority of the complaints I’ve heard and have had myself about the Palm Pre are constructional issues, a poor design with the sliding keyboard mechanism that wears out the connection to the touchscreen, or giant cracks appearing on the face suddenly after hours of removing the wrapper.

The Palm Pixi appears to have no moving parts and still has a real tactile keyboard (a must for me and many others I know that are less concerned with games and watching stuff and more concerned with getting things done). The keyboard looks bigger than the Palm Centro’s, perhaps may I hope, back to the Treo 700 keyboard? I’m guessing not, but one can hope. I know what you’re thinking, why would I want to hail back to one of the chunkiest phones since the Zach Morris “Mobile” Phone? Because this thing is going to be oh so thin… .05 inches thinner than iPhone 3Gs! That’s like a whole other business card you could be carrying in your pocket if you switch from iPhone 3Gs to Palm Pixi come this holiday season.

It appears that the phone will have a nice little 8 GB solid state flash drive on board, and I’m not sure but with Palm’s track record I doubt there will be a 16 GB option like the Apple offering. The Pixi’s touchscreen in the demos appear to be just as responsive, if not more, than the Palm Pre, bringing life and purpose to webOS on board. An added possibility that I’d be willing to soil my pants over; the back is reportedly as soft as the replacement backs for the Palm Pre and Touchstone. That would mean that they would be touchstone ready, so chumps like me that already have two touchstones will be able to switch over to the Palm Pixi with less travail.

Again, Palm Pixi relinquishes major touchscreen real estate with a real keyboard, where iPhone brings a beautiful full sized keyboard with the inconvenience of a virtual keyboard. So it’s really up to your priorities. That’s a nice balanced way of putting it, but come on, that marble game on iPhone (and also our childhoods) where you tilt the ball through a treacherous holey maze is great but gets old after 10 minutes. Trade that for the ability to type text messages, web sites, addresses in google maps, etc with at least 33% more speed (conservatively) because of the real keyboard, not to mention the ability to do it all simultaneously because of a multi-tasking OS? We’ll leave that up to you.

One thing iPhone will almost always have over Palm products and their newer webOS platform is a much greater App development support community. Their library of Apps might always be greater, but as Palm releases access to more developers to distribute directly through their App Catalog, we’ll see how Palm’s more liberal paradigm will play out in App variety. I’ve been pretty disappointed so far with the time it’s taken for the App catalog to grow, but what do I know about these kinds of rollouts? Nada.

Most of the other differences boil down to the differences between most Palm and Apple products. The Palm Pixi has the normal volume buttons and mute switch on most Palm phones.

I’m hoping Pixi is a little snappier than Pre. I’m spending my young adult years wating for my emails to open.

Review for The Best Palm Pixi

2009-12-07T20:10:00.001-08:00

When the Palm Pixi first appeared in May, there was a lot of excitement about an affordable Web OS device with a slim and sexy design. By the time Pixi had arrived to Market, a deluge of Android phones lead by the Motorola Droid and the powerful iPhone 3GS had been released. Android 2.0 and Motoblur feature functionalities that are close to Palm's Synergy, while the Pixi lacks WiFi. At a street price, as low as $25 (with a new contract), the Pixi is cheaper than the Palm Pre or the Droid, but when you take into account the total cost of ownership ($69/mo + tax + fees for two years) the savings are rather small. What do you really get with the Palm Pixi? Find out!

Technical highlights

3G EVDO Rev A, Bluetooth 2.1, NO WIFI
2.63" capacitive (320x400)
8GB of storage
256MB of RAM (less than the Pre)
Processor: thought to be slower than the Pre
2MP camera + LED flash
GPS, motion+light+proximity sensor
3.26oz (92.5g)
Complete Pixi specifications from Palm, Pre/Pixi comparison (pdf)

Physical design (Sexy!)

Take a quick look at the Palm Pixi body

It's undeniable that the Palm Pixi looks great. Its pure design will probably score big points at first sight. The keyboard looks small, but it turns out to be really good (more on that later). While the front has a shiny piano black surface, the back is made of a soft, non-slippery, material. It seems like it would absorb mild shocks as well, although I don't think that this is a design goal. At 2.63", the screen is relatively small and seems to be the minimum surface with which multi-touch gestures would work. To charge the phone, you can plug a micro USB cable, or you can use Palm's Touch Stone for wireless charging (I was not able to try it, mine was apparently busted). By the way, I don't like the USB port plastic protector on the side. If you don't have the touchstone, it's pretty annoying to deal with that piece of plastic.

Overall, the design is great, and the only thing that immediately bugged me is the placement of the on/off button. It's located at the upper left, slightly in the back. This is the button that you press to put the phone to sleep or wake it up. In my opinion, it is a poor placement for a button that will be pressed very often.

Display (Small but sharp)

It’s a tiny space for multitouch gestures

As I said above, 2.63" the screen is relatively small, but in general it works well. It is only when I use multitouch gestures that I feel cramped. That's particularly true with Google Maps because that application has a several clickable items on the the map at all times. Still, these gestures make Web OS more user-friendly than Android sometimes. WebOS works very well on the small screen, stuff like email or web browsing are totally usable.

I really like the secondary touch surface but would trade it for a larger screen

The touch screen is sensitive and accurate: it is relatively easy to place a text cursor in between two letters, for example. Just underneath the screen, there is a touch sensitive surface where you perform gestures like "back" or "up". That's a WebOS thing, and it works really well, but that also occupies a substantial surface that could have been used to extend the display... Note that the screen can only reproduce 18-bit colors (262,144 colors) instead of the 24-bit (16.7M colors) that many screens can, but in practice, I did not find this to be a problem.

Keyboard (Great)

The keyboard is great, if it was a bit wider, Blackberry should worry

The keyboard is a little worrisome when you look at it, but I quickly realized that it is one of the best that I've used. I can type fast with it, and it is second only to my Blackberry Curve 8900, and better than my Curve 9700. The keys click sharply, but gently, and the feel is just great. They are also made of a soft material, so when you press them, they seem to deform just a little bit and absorb the excess pressure. If the keyboard was wider, it could do some real damage to Blackberry, at least in my book. Remember that keyboard preferences are a very personal thing. My best advice is: go to a store and type with it.

Basic phone functions (Good)

Placing a call is very easy: you can either type a name to find a contact or click on the Phone app to dial a number on the virtual numeric pad. The audio quality is average to below average. I found the sound to be a little muffled (like the Droid) and the volume is kind of soft. The back speaker is too weak for a phone conversation if you are not in an ideal environment (quiet room). These issues aren't deal breaker, but definitely good to have on your radar.

Finding contacts is very easy

To unlock, drag the yellow icon away

More good things: the "drag to unlock" worked very well. It is easy and simple. I like it. Note that if you use the Facebook App, WebOS will merge your contacts and retrieve a profile photo of your contacts whenever possible. That's cool.

Bizarre: while I was sitting in my couch, EVDO reception quality was varying wildly from 1 to 5 bars every few minutes... go figure.

Communications (Very good)

Email: With Exchange, POP and IMAP supported out of the box, it is easy to setup email. If you are using a popular email provider, simply adding your email and password is enough for the Pixi to setup an account. In my case, I'm using an Exchange server, so I had to type in more information manually but it was quick too. The notification system at the bottom of the screen works well, even if you can only see the last item. If you have more than one account, it is possible to look at a combined inbox, but if you want to, you can also look at individual accounts. Typically, you can see only 3 emails on the screen and you will have to scroll down or open an item if you want more information.

Email search: in the "Inbox" view, you can simply type and it will initiate a search. This is handy and the search is fast enough.

Misc: There is no Gmail app, so your Gmail will be treated like a regular POP or IMAP account.

Messaging: Out of the box, the Palm Pixi supports SMS, MMS, Google Talk, AIM and Yahoo Messenger. It's far from complete, but it covers a good user base. Check if that works with your particular group of friends, but I personally miss MSN Messenger a lot, and I don't really want to port all my MSN contacts over to Yahoo. Overall, IM and SMS/MMS work fairly well. The other app that I miss a lot is Skype.

The app is too limited, m.facebook.com is slower (!) but more complete

Facebook: The support is minimal: you can pretty much update your status, view the news feed and vote/comment. That's it and it's too little. You can also go to Facebook for mobile to get more features. It's not as fast an "app" though.

Web Browsing

I recommend avoiding heavy sites

The page rendering is on par with Android phones, but I noticed that the image reduction was not as good as like the Droid or the iPhone. Palm uses a filtering that looks less smooth, but it might require less processing however. Javascript seems well supported and things like our Disqus comments work. during the loading itself, things can get very slow, but once the page is fully loaded, gets better. I had a mixed experience with web browsing. Sometimes, it would be fine and work normally, sometimes it would be really slow and not reactive at all. The phone would hang for a few seconds and come back to life. Clearly, the web experience is jeopardized by the performance, but if you use mobile websites (like m.cnn.com or ubergizmo.mobi) that use less memory, it will work much better.

No Wi-Fi: big deal?

If you don't know that the Palm Pixi does not have Wi-Fi, you are probably glad to learn this now. Yes, we all prefer "with WiFi", but the question is: is it a big deal? First, it depends on how good your 3G reception is: if it's too weak or non-existent, then it sucks. Move on and forget about the Pixi. During this review, I mostly had 3 bars, with episodic jumps to 1 and 5. Overall, the Pixi worked OK and at no point and screamed "why doesn't it have Wi-Fi?!". So my best guess is that it's OK for the average user, and even streaming movies from YouTube worked well (see video later in the review). I'm won't enter in the "why did Palm remove Wi-Fi?" debate - it is really their choice, and ours is to buy or not.

Software

The Palm Pixi has a user interface look and feel that is similar to the Palm Pre. I'm not sure if I should dive into a long review of the WebOS here (let me know in the comments), but here are the highlights:

WebOS offers true multitasking and shows clearly what’s running

Quick view of the Pixi user interface

Multitasking: This is a hot topic these days. Yes, the Pixi is multitask capable, like the Pre (unlike the iPhone). Applications are displayed as "cards" and it is easy to see what's running and close the apps that you don't need. In that respect, it is much better than Android where a bunch of stuff can run in the background and most users won't know anything about it. The real issue with multitasking is that the Pixi is slow. If you have 2 or 3 apps opened (email, maps, Facebook) you can feel the drag. I ended up using it as a mono-task device to keep it as responsive as possible.

User interface: Overall, Palm has an excellent user interface. The learning curve is not steep at all. I think that this is a first-class user interface that is relatively fast - if you use the Pixi as a mono-task device.

Copy/Paste: The copy/paste function is not impressive to start with, but the slow speed of the Pixi makes it even worse. Anyway, I find myself re-typing short bits of text, rather than copy/pasting.

Misc: The App store works well and it is easy to find applications... when they exist. Palm's library is much smaller than the competition. However, the sheer number of apps don't mean much to individual users, so I would recommend you to take a look and see if what you want/need is there. The Pixi is a good smartphone out of the box, but if you can't live without Skype or a decent version of Facebook, this might not work for you.

USB connection: Upon connecting your Pixi to a computer via USB, you will be asked if you want to Sync, Charge or Mount it as a USB drive. If you choose the USB drive option, the phone won't be able to receive/place calls. This is weird, but important to remember: you might miss a call if you forget to unplug it! Copying file was also relatively slow: two files (27MB combined) took 40 seconds to copy over.

I said “just restart”!!!

Stuff happens: During this test, my Pixi decided to wipe itself out one day. Call it "reboot of death" but one morning, it said that my Palm account no longer existed. I asked it to reboot *without wiping itself*, but it did wipe itself anyway... wow. I don't think that this is a widespread problem. I'm probably just very unlucky, but wanted to document this, in case it happens to someone else. Update: this might be a bigger issue than I thought. Others are reporting account+data losses as well.

Performance

More apps running ni the background means: slower phone

The performance is really the Pixi's soft spot, to say the least. For some of you, this might be called a deal-breaker. It is noticeably slower than the Palm Pre (and other phones). From the outside, the issue eems to be a combination of the slower processor and smaller memory size, but "why" doesn't matter: this effectively translates into a device that is relatively and prone to become even more sluggish as more apps are loaded. It can become downright unusable. You may have seen reports of hangs, momentary freezes and slowness to come back from sleep mode. I have occasionally experienced all of that, although it crashed "only" a couple of times this week. But when that happens, it is frustrating! If you have many accounts (Google, Exchange, Yahoo, Facebook...), the phone becomes really sluggish during Sync operations.

With many apps loaded at once, the phone freezes sometimes

Instead of writing a long paragraph to describe performance, I shot a video that shows you how it feels to use a Palm Pixi after a couple of weeks (all phones are kind of snappy at first...). You can decide for yourself if the speed is "good enough" of if you can't stand it.

Photo & Video capture (Poor & Non-existent)

It looked great on the screen, but actual photos are below average

This is a crop without rescaling: low photo quality

The photo gallery app is average

Photos quality is definitely poor. Even when shot in very good lighting conditions, the photos have fuzzy edges, poor contrast, color balance and saturation. This is probably the worst camera that I've seen in the phone for 2009 (I tend to review only smartphones, just to be clear). There's no much else to say, except that if you want to see it for yourself, head to Ubergizmo’s flickr account to look at the original images.

There's no video capture, so this portion of the review is short. It's up to you to decide if that's a deal breaker or not. What do you think? Post a comment.

Multimedia

YouTube video playback looks great. This was over 3G

YouTube: Playing YouTube movies over 3G worked very well, even with 3/5 bars. The video quality was very good (see video), but with the small screen, it is hard to get a "cinematic" experience. That said, it's more than enough to enjoy a short clip here and there.

MP3 playback: the basis are covered well

Music: Just like most phones that I have tested recently, the Music Player works fairly well, and the user interface has all the basics. The search is also well done: within a category (artists, albums, songs, genre) you can type a search keyword. No complaints.

Video playback: I've copied a few PSP Mpeg4 movie trailers to the Palm Pixi and it was able to play them flawlessly. If you have .mp4 files for mobile content, you will probably be able to enjoy them. For reference, here are the details of the file that I have tried (mp4v codec 368x208 29.97fps, stereo 48Khz 16bits AAC).

Battery Life

With moderate usage (push email always ON, moderate browsing), You can get anywhere between 14h and 20h. this can vary widely depending on whether or not background tasks are running or how long the display stays on and how bright it is. The bottom-line is that you will need to charge it every evening or you will have a dead phone.

Word Docs, Excel, Powerpoint

A sample Powerpoint file found on the web

Out of the box, you can open and view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but it looks like to need to upgrade DocsToGo in order to edit. At least, it's possible at some level.

The phone has also crashed when I was attempting to open a simple Excel file (it always crashes with that particular one). I blame the app, but an OS should never crash... I had to pull the battery out.

Economics

When you get a phone with a contract, the contract costs $1400 to $2500 over two years, depending on which service level and carrier you choose. That's before taxes and fees. In that context, the actual price of a smartphone (after discounts+rebate) counts only for 15% or less of the total cost of ownership. The first thing that you need to tell yourself is that a $50 or $100 price difference really doesn't change things all that much. Always look at the total cost of ownership when you choose a phone+carrier you can save hundred of dollars.

Conclusion

On the surface, the Pixi is a very attractive phone. It has a great, intuitive, user interface. However, to overcome the performance issues, users have to use the Pixi as a very basic smartphone: try to do as little as possible with it, and it might run just "OK". While this is really your choice to put up with the slow performance (again check the video to see if you think it's "too" slow), I would personally not go for it. As good, small and light that the Pixi is, it should have been built with as a faster phone, period. If you like Sprint as a carrier, you can look at the HTC Hero (read our HTC Hero Review) or simply go for the Palm Pre itself ($99 - check our Pre Review here). If your horizons are wider, check the links below and read our other smartphones reviews. If you are just in love with the Pixi's design, I understand, but you have been warned.

Links

Don't miss these: Motorola Droid Review, Nokia N900 Review, iPhone 3GS Review, HTC Hero Review, MyTouch 3G Review/HTC Magic, Nokia N97 Review

Palm Pixi homepage, Palm Pixi at Sprint, Palm Pixi at Wirefly (lower price)

Palm Pixi photo samples (gallery), Palm Pixi misc apps photo gallery

Second Opinion

Feel free to drop your own opinion in the comments section below. If you own one, tell the world how it works for you. If you have additional questions, drop them, I’ll try to reply asap.

As usual, I think that there are no "unbiased reviews". Reviews are always biased by how we use phones, and by our personal preferences/history. If you have time, here are a few reads that you might want to check out, in no particular order: Engadget, Washington Post, Gizmodo, PhoneArena

Palm Pixi reviews very Good

2009-12-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

• Slower processor (using an older ARM11 architecture vs. faster ARM Cortex A8)
• Smaller and squintier 400x320, 2.63-inch, 18-bit color screen (vs. 480x320, 3.1-inch, 24-bit color)
• 2-megapixel camera (vs. 3MP)
• No Wi-Fi

Pixi Perfect Design (Just About)

There has not been a candybar phone more perfectly designed and executed than the Pixi. It's exactly the size and shape a phone that aspires to be small should be. It's a Hot Pocket sliced in half, but flat and glossy on top and round and rubbery on the bottom. It almost feels fake, like a concept that you hope is a real phone but isn't, except that in this case, it really is. It fits inside of an iPhone, if you wanna get more literal.

Plastic, slightly sticky Rice Krispie keys, arranged in four rows form a keyboard so electrifyingly good it's thrilling, like finding an actually sweet wind-up toy in your cereal box (Rice Krispies, of course) every time you type. They keys are tiny, but have a deceptive amount of rise, so your fat thumbs can feel out individual nubs, which pop in this remarkably satisfying way when you click down. The size-to-goodness ratio might just be the best on any keyboard I've used. If there's any reason to pick the Pixi over the Pre, it's if you type a shocking amount on your phone, because the Pixi's is better by like an order of magnitude. Or eleventy.

Between the screen, with its shaved corners, and the keyboard is a stretch of empty space. Until you run your finger along it, and a spark—a line of light, really—emerges. The LED strip, invisible when it's not indicating something, replaces the ball on the Pre, which I always thought was a weird little speed bump when you stroked the gesture area, anyway. It's kind of beautiful, the stark aesthetic of it emotionally tinged with sci-fi imagery, from Gort to Cyclop's visor.

Two things are wrong. The screen lock button on the top left is a little too in touch with the overall robustness of the phone, so it's hard to push and doesn't provide enough feedback. On the opposite end of that spectrum, the trap door covering the micro USB port feels flimsy and aggravatingly snaps shut, making plugging in a USB cable a struggle worthy of a Homerian epic every single time.

Tinkerbell Would Be Pissed

The Pixi is slow.

Achingly.

Maddeningly.

Ripyourhairoutandsmashitagainstthewallingly.

It lags, it hangs, it stutters, it freezes. A lot. A simple fact: Multitasking isn't better than unitasking when it takes longer to get shit done. An example: I wanted to take a picture while I had the browser and and App Catalog open. Simple. The camera froze spectacularly, rendering the entire phone completely unusable for well over 30 seconds—whenever I tried to flick the camera card away (cards are apps), it would shoot halfway off the screen, then appear back in its place. Somewhere between 30-45 seconds later, it regained composure. That's with just three core apps open, and no active syncing happening in the background.

True, I could sometimes have up to four apps running without problems, at least for a minute or so, before things starting getting cludgy. But it hangs even with just a single app running sometimes. (Just try loading the full Gizmodo page.) And every time you open an app, there's a solid expanse of time that elapses that you can feel, and it gets old real quick. Maybe webOS is just more transparent about load times than the iPhone, which masks them with title screens, but the whole experience of using this phone is like swimming through very pretty Jello, with one arm, wearing a cast-iron suit, or something like that.

Screen, Camera and Other Hardware

You get used to the smaller screen and its 80 fewer pixels, mostly. It's cramped, but you'll only be directly, painfully cognizant of it from time to time, like when you're reading some text outside of Palm's own apps or navigating web pages. It's not a crappy screen, but it's not exceptionally bright or vibrant, either. The touch accuracy seemed less spot-on than the Pre too, though that could've been the effect of smaller targets because of the tinier screen, like the drop down menu for apps in the top left corner, which is just a sliver on the Pixi.

The Pixi's 2MP camera is unimpressive. The comparison shot above—of ramen, people—was taken with a 2MP iPhone 3G in the exact same lighting and place, snapped within 10 seconds of each other. The camera app, when it's not freezing up, is quick to shoot once you press the button though, which is definitely something.

And I'll just say it: No Wi-Fi sucks, since there are lots of place in NY where even Sprint's 3G can't penetrate.

Software

The Pixi comes with webOS 1.3.1. Palm's definitely tuned things up since webOS originally shipped in June with stuff like more support for Yahoo services, the ability to buy songs over 3G, performance improvements and other interface sprucing up, but it's not a radically difference experience than the one Chen documented exhaustively here. (In other words, read that for the software review, since it's basically the same, just much slooooower on the Pixi.)

What's different now is that there are over 300 apps in the App Catalog, and Palm's dumping fresh ones in every week. So the app situation is greatly improved. The problem is that it's still behind the rest of the pack though—iPhone, Android and BlackBerry—and being fourth-place development priority for cross-platform developers with limited resources it not a great place to be, so Palm's got a rough road here. Oh, one interesting point, since this is supposed to be the smartphone OS for multitasking, is that while an app is downloading from the App Catalog, you can't browse for other apps—if you leave the download page, it cancels. So I hope you've got good Sprint reception in your house.

The other thing that's changed is iTunes. Palm's former official way to sync your media to your phone is broken. Irrevocably. Even if Palm does restore iTunes syncing with its dirty hack (no really, it is a dirty hack, impersonating an iPod with a false USB ID) the entire model is screwed. Putting people buying your phone in the middle of a stupid pissing match that you're destined to lose isn't cool. In the meantime, Palm's official solution is for people to sideload or use third-party apps like DoubleTwist.

Don't Buy It

The Pixi is screwed. It's totally cannibalized by the technologically superior Pre, which you can find for under $100. Even if you can get the Pixi for $30 at Walmart, it's worth trading up to the Pre for $40 or $50 more if you're absolutely wedded to the idea of a webOS phone, simply for the speed and screen. Mostly the speed, since the Pixi is brain damaged, three-legged dog slow, as nice as the hardware is on the outside.

Not to mention, for a hundred dollars, there are phones that just offer better experiences and aren't in the same awkward position Palm is in the smartphone fight. I'm talking of course, about the Droid Eris, Android's 99-dollar darling on Verizon. The entire reason to buy the Pixi—a value proposition—has completely evaporated. And I almost feel bad about that. Almost.

Incredible keyboard (for the size)

Awesome design and build

webOS is nice

Camera sucks

Palm's dumb iTunes fight

Slow

I mean, slooooooooooooooooooooow

Petite Palm Pixi Simplifies, Pretties Up the Smartphone

2009-12-07T17:30:00.000-08:00

By Steven Levy

September 9, 2009 |

1:32 am |

Wired’s Steven Levy reports on the latest phone from Palm.

Palm elbowed its way into the smartphone discussion this year with the introduction of its slick multitasking handset, the Pre. Now Palm is announcing a little sister, called Pixi.

The Pixi kind of looks like a Blackberry Curve after an inspired makeover by a pricey SoHo hair stylist and a liposuction doctor.

It’s more svelte than the Palm Pre — slimmer even, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein notes, than its blood rival, the iPhone, made by his former employer. Like the Pre it has a small physical keyboard. But the Pixi’s keyboard doesn’t slide out; it squats below the screen, always in view.

What’s more, Palm is offering colorful custom back plates based on designs from what Rubinstein calls “upcoming artists.” The first five options, to be released in numbered editions of 5,000 each, include a snakeskin pattern, a hummingbird, a stylized skull, and a searing red desert landscape that, in the words of the artist, confronts “themes of isolation, fear, destruction and resilience.”

No wonder that the Pixi announcement comes just before Fashion Week in New York City, which Palm is co-sponsoring.

The Pixi’s diminutiveness isn’t limited to its waistline. It will be priced lower than the Pre — probably under $100 with a 2-year contract, but Rubinstein isn’t saying for sure. Its screen is smaller, with 320 x 400 pixels, as opposed to the Pre’s 320 x 480, and it has just 8 GB of memory. The software is the same webOS as used by the Pre, though there are new applications for Yahoo Messenger and Facebook, but Pixi has dropped the Pre’s single navigation button. (The functions of that control are evoked simply by tapping the screen.)

Pixi is also a bit slower than its big brother. Palm product manager Sachin Kansal says that in most functions it performs similarly to the Pre, but in multimedia apps, it’s less zippy. There’s no Wi-Fi. The target audience, he says, is people mainly interested in communications, as opposed to those who engage in lots of graphics-intensive activities.

Like the Pre, the Pixi runs on the Sprint network.

Rubinstein says to expect the Palm’s webOS family to grow even further. From the start, he says, he has instructed his software engineers not to do their designing for Pre, but “an OS for the next 10 to 15 years.” While the Pixi runs webOS in a smaller package than the Pre, he’s not ruling out something in the other direction.

Though some analysts estimate that the Pre’s sales have leveled off after its initial burst, Rubinstein is upbeat, saying that he’s proud of Palm’s performance against tough competition from Apple and RIM.

And what of Palm’s relatively sparse selection of apps — at 65 or so, roughly one thousandth of Apple’s ecosystem? “It sounds small, but they’re really good,” Rubinstein says. He promises that more will come as the Palm opens up to a wider range of developers.

Apple’s well-publicized rejections of certain apps may play in Palm’s favor, as Rubinstein says that he won’t discriminate. For example, he says, a Google Voice app for Palm is definitely coming.

As for that TV ad with the zoned-out sylph for a spokesperson, Rubinstein says that he’s heard pros and cons, but the campaign has tested well. “I’m no expert on ads,” he says, clearly distinguishing himself from his former boss in Cupertino.

The Pixi will be available “in time for holiday sales,” he says.

Palm Pixi press release [Palm.com]

Photos courtesy Palm Inc.

Palm Pixi Review

2009-12-07T01:23:00.000-08:00

By Dieter Bohn | Thursday, Nov 12, 2009 | 39 comments »

The Palm Pixi is a tiny smartphone with enough features and elegance to woo even the most die-hard feature phone user, but current Pre owners will want to stick with what they have.

The $99 Palm Pixi will be unleashed upon the world this Sunday and after using one full-time for two days, I can say it's a great smartphone for anybody who hasn't made the jump past feature phones. The Pixi comes in a tiny, almost bite-able form-factor that's immediately appealing -- all the more so because inside that little frame is the elegance and power of webOS.

For current smartphone owners, however, there are a few compromises that, all combined, lead me to suggest that most those interested in webOS should still opt for the more powerful Pre.

Read on for our full review!

What is the Pixi?

Let's start by laying out what the Pixi is -- and what it is not. For many of you reading this, the following paragraph has nothing you don't already know. Let's get some of the basics out of the way first.

Palm Pixi Special Coverage

The Pixi is Palm's latest webOS smartphone, available exclusively on Sprint for now. It is a followup to the original Palm Pre in some senses, although it's not strictly a successor, more like a little brother or sister. The Pixi has a 'candybar' form factor, which means that it is a simple slab with a full QWERTY keyboard sitting underneath a screen. Because it runs webOS, it can run multiple applications in 'cards' at the same time, pull in multiple Google, Yahoo, Exchange, LinkedIn, and Yahoo accounts with Synergy - getting all of your email, calendars, and contacts in a single place. You can do web browsing, IM, email, YouTube, SMS, MMS, Facebook, turn-by-turn GPS Navigation, take pictures (with a flash) and more. It has a small (320x400) capacitive touchscreen that you can use with your fingers instead of a stylus. You can play your music and videos on it and listen via the built-in, standard 3.5mm headset jack. In short, it's a full-featured smartphone that can do most things full-featured smartphones can do these days, but in a package that's more affordable and with an OS that's easy to learn and use.

If you're unfamiliar with webOS and want to learn more, we have covered it quite extensively in both our Palm Pre Guide and Palm Pre Review. All the basics are there, from Synergy to Universal Search to Multitasking and why it matters.

Here's what Pixi is not: it's not a hardcore power-user's smartphone. It lacks certain features that power users demand, including a very fast processor, WiFi, and a large screen. We'll get back to those three compromises later in the review, but the bottom line is that if you're already a Pre owner or are looking for a lot of power in your smartphone, you'll be making a few compromises in order to get into this form factor.

That form factor is something I need to dwell on a bit, because the Pixi is small, it's tiny, it's thin. Until you hold it in your hand it's difficult to get across, but ounce for ounce and inch for inch, I'm not sure I've ever seen as elegant and powerful a phone in a size this small. Here's a brief video where I try to get that across:

[YouTube Link]

Hardware and Design

The Pixi clocks in at a svelte (seriously, I'm going to run out of adjectives for 'small' soon) 2.17" x 4.37" x 0.43". It's the thinnest phone Palm has ever made and they say it's 10% thinner than the iPhone, but that's comparing it to the iPhone's thickest point. The Pixi does have some slight rounding on the back, making it feel great in the hand.

Actually, what makes the Pixi feel great in the hand is how narrow it is - 2.17 inches. It's narrower than the Pre and much narrower than the iPhone or Droid, in fact it's narrower than just about any smartphone out there barring the Centro or the Pearl. A Pixie is a small sprite and the Pixi fits that bill. People: it's really small.

Palm has combined the diminutive form factor with a relatively minimalist design. The front of the phone is a flat sheet of black plastic with only the QWERTY keyboard for buttons at the bottom. The majority of the phone is taken up by the capacitive touchscreen, above which you'll find the speaker, Sprint logo, and if you look closely, two barely visible sensors for light and proximity. The microphone is also scurried away on the front of the phone, a tiny hole to the left of the OPT key.

The left and bottom of the phone are blank, just sloping curves. The right side has volume buttons and Palm's signature ringer switch, which allows you to set the phone to vibrate quickly. On my review-unit the ringer switch seems a little fiddly - flexing or pressing near it seems to move the switch just a little bit and temporarily toggles vibrate mode. I've spoken to several other people with Pixi phones and nobody else reports that issue, so mine could be an isolated case. Also on the right side is the microUSB charging port underneath a flap. The flap is a little annoying but it does give the Pixi cleaner lines. It's certainly better than the USB door on the Pre - the Pixi's flap has a tiny magnet on it to ensure it sticks closed.

On the top you have a 3.5 mm headset jack and a power button. You'll be reaching for that power button every time you want to interact with the phone since the keyboard can't activate the screen, so find a position in your hand where you can reach for it easily. Luckily, as you're no doubt tired of reading by now, the Pixi is small.

On the back you have a centered 2 megapixel camera and a flash flanked by two speaker grills. The two speaker grills do give the Pixi some nice symmetry, but in practice only one of them kicks out any appreciable sound. Also on the back is a tiny hole where you can attach a lanyard. The included battery cover is not Touchstone-charger compatible and is smooth black with the Palm logo centered on it.

As I mentioned, the Pixi has a flat, plastic front and it's pretty aggressive at picking up fingerprints and face grease. It doesn't seem too bad about scratching -- but I haven't taken my keys to the thing (yet!). The rest of the device, thankfully, has a matted, 'soft-touch' finish. In fact, the rest of the device is a single piece, the battery cover, that can be a bear to remove so you can replace it with a touchstone battery cover or artist-series cover. Here's an unboxing video where I demonstrate how to deal with it: (Update: The battery cover instructions below are wrong, you want to start on the left side of the Pixi. Here's an updated How To video.)

[YouTube Link]

The fact that Palm went ahead and got rid of all ancillary buttons on the face also feels more elegant than the Pre. There's just keyboard and gestures. In the place of a lighted center button is the gesture area between the keyboard and the screen where you can make your back swipes, up-swipes for card view, or just tap the center to replicate the behavior of the Pre's center button.

One bit of elegance on the front of the device - the keyboard letters are white but the alternate letters are now gray instead of orange - it makes for a much better look for this device. Unless you go and get yourself an artist-series battery cover, the only color on the entire device is the red indicator on the silent switch. Of course, we now have the problem of the official "Orange" button on the Pre being gray on the Pixi. I for one vote that we just start calling the thing 'Opt,' which is what I wanted to call it all along. Yes, it's this sort of nit-picky thing we at PreCentral.net take pride in bringing to your attention.

If you can't tell: I'm in love with the Pixi's form factor. It's itty-bitty-awesome. I've always preferred "front-facing-QWERTY-keyboard" phones ever since the Treo 600 (compare that to the Pixi!), so the Pixi fits that need. There's no sliding mechanism to futz with, which makes the Pixi feel more solid overall than the Pre.

Those 'artist-series' back covers I've referenced are a new thing for Palm. They are limited-run (5000 each) battery covers for the Pixi with unique artwork on them, each signed and numbered. They are available for pre-order now for $49.99, shipping in early December. For that price, you'll be relieved to hear that they are Touchstone compatible. The Touchstone, if you didn't know, is an innovative "inductive charger" that can charge the Pixi using magnets merely by setting the phone down on it.

Keyboard

Making a phone this small comes with tradeoffs and compromises. Chief amongst those for most users will be the physical keyboard: it's also tiny, measuring 1.75" across by 0.9" tall in a square shape. That's slightly smaller than the Pre's keyboard, for those of you keeping track. Palm's been making tiny little keyboards since the Centro, though, and they've learned quite a bit over the years about how to design them. I have plenty of experience with these keyboards and perhaps that skews my perception a bit, but after just an hour or so I am able to fly on the keyboard. Once you find a way to hit the keys that's comfortable for you, that small size is actually a boon because there's less space for your thumbs to travel (one reason I dislike landscape keyboards is they slow me down.)

The keys are very slightly 'rubbery.' If you're a Palm fanatic, the scale of hardness goes thusly, starting with the hardest: Classic Treo, Treo Pro, Pixi, Pre (the Pixi and Pre are very close, though), Centro. Non-Palm-fanatics just need to know that they're firm enough to feel solid under your thumb but have enough 'rubberiness' to them that you can hit them with a fingernail without slipping.

The keys have a gratifying 'click' to them and seem to 'travel' more than they do on the Pre. This is no doubt due to the fact that it's easier to fit a keyboard on a flat slab than it is inside a slider. The keys are slightly squarer and flatter than what you'll find the Pre, too.

I'll sum it up like this: yes, it's small, but you can adjust and eventually it will be second-nature. Definitely give the keyboard a shot before you buy it, but give it an honest shot. I think only the most large, calloused thumbs wouldn't be able to find a groove with it.

webOS

I won't be going over everything in webOS here, but just putting forth a few notes. Again, if you're new to webOS, our Palm Pre Guide is the place to start. I'm covering all the new features in webOS 1.3.1 in a separate article.

As Derek mentioned in his blog post this morning, the Pixi ships with webOS 1.2.9 but is upgradable to webOS 1.3.1 right away over the air (just check your updates app). Pre users have to wait "shortly thereafter," according to Palm. Let's hope that the wait is short indeed. My review unit was running a special build of webOS 1.3.1 that Palm made available to us ahead of the over-the-air update for all Pixi phones.

Overall the setup experience on the Pixi is slightly less than ideal: before you can really and truly get going you need to update the OS over the air, hook up all your Synergy accounts, and then wait through a period of significant OS lagginess as the devices pulls down and processes all that information from the cloud over your EVDO connection. Once it's all done, it's grand, but out-of-the-box most users are going to want to get straight to playing with the device instead of waiting for Synergy to finish doing its thing.

In case you don't want to click over to the full 1.3.1 article, here are the most important new features:

Yahoo has been added to Synergy: Email, Contacts, Calendar, and IM
Copy, forward, or delete individual text messages and IMs
PIN length can now be arbitrarily long and you can set the PIN timeout to any length of time up to a half hour
Placeholder images for Flash in the web browser, YouTube videos launch the YouTube app
The Music Player now has a time 'scrubber' that pops up when you hold down the FF or RW button.
The 'underpinnings' for the Facebook app are here, which is a way of saying Pre users won't get it until they get 1.3.1.

The most notable non-feature in webOS 1.3.1: it doesn't sync directly with iTunes 9.0.2.

Performance and Speed

It's difficult to say whether speed is improved or not on webOS 1.3.1 since I'm comparing it to the Pre, which has a faster processor. I am tempted to say that 1.3.1 is faster in places. The Phone app in particular is much faster for me, there are definitely improvements there. I do find things are fast enough as long as you keep the number of open cards under 5. Overall it's a usable experience and better than I expected given that the Pixi's processor is known to be slower than the Pre's. The main thing is to remember to close cards that you're not using.

I have, of course, experienced some noticeable lag and can tell the difference in speed between the Pixi and the Pre. The Pixi seems to slow down inexplicably and then catch itself and speed up again in a way that's mysterious to me. With the Pre, I can pretty much always attribute a slowdown to a known quantity like having too many cards open or running a particularly resource-hungry app. With the Pixi it's harder to pin down sometimes. I wouldn't turn anybody away from the Pixi because of its speed and performance -- except for Pre users, see below.

I am aware that the Pixi's chipset includes a graphics processing unit (a chip dedicated just for graphics instead of a general processor) and that webOS doesn't yet fully utilize GPUs to their fullest. So I hold out hope that we could see some fairly significant speed improvements on the Pixi in the not-too-distant future. For what it's worth, I loaded up Perfect Bounce on both the Pixi and the Pre and the game's performance seemed identical on both devices.

Sprint

The Pixi is exclusive to Sprint for the time being and I think that's a real pity. That said, it does need to be said that you can save a significant amount of money over Verizon or T-Mobile over the life of a two year contract. I've griped before that at $99 with a $100 mail-in rebate, the 'out-the-door' $199 price for the Pixi is much too high for the target demographic for this phone. If Sprint and Palm can get the total cost of ownership message across, that worry is significantly mitigated.

Like the Pre before it, the Pixi requires an Everything Data plan. Now that Sprint has their cheap Any Mobile Any Time plans, concerns over plan pricing on Sprint aren't as big of a factor for me. As I mentioned, they cost significantly less than the competition.

Call Quality, Sound Quality

Call quality on the Pixi is quite good in my testing so far - clear and loud without much distortion at maximum volume. Overall the Pixi seems to pick up Sprint signal as well as any other Sprint phone I've used.

The speakerphone, on the other hand, isn't anything to get enthused about. It's loud enough for me and sounds like a cell phone's speaker. It's slightly quieter than the Pre's speaker, but does the job.

Camera

The Pixi has a 2 megapixel camera with a flash and it's a disappointment. It doesn't compare well with the Palm Pre's camera (which has more advanced image processing) or the iPhone 3GS's camera. Like the Pre, the Pixi cannot record video.

A picture says a thousand words, right? Here are three, taken at the same time with the Pixi, Pre, and iPhone 3GS.

Palm Pixi Photo
Palm Pre Photo	iPhone 3GS Photo

I'm not good at talking about images, but here goes: the Pixi's image seems unnecessarily pixelated and, what's worse, significantly overexposed to my eyes. While these photos were taken on a cloudy day and I therefore think both the Pre and iPhone 3GS's images could stand to have a little more brightness, their images could easily be fixed up with some simple photo editing software. I can forgive the Pixi having a slightly lower-quality image overall, it does have fewer megapixels, but even a camera with a low megapixel count should be able to do better. The Pixi's picture is (literally) a washout.

It'll do for quick shots, but I wish it were better.

Specs

I've gone this far without listing the specs for the Pixi by design. It's not that I want to bury the fact that they're not very impressive, it's more that they aren't really the point of the phone. We're a gadget blog, though, so the standard smartphone metrics matter to us and likely they matter to you, the vast majority of our dear readers. So here they be, with some commentary:

Sprint EVDO Rev A

If you're in an area with good Sprint signal, it's stupendous. If you're not, the lack of WiFi is going to hurt more than usual. I should note that the Pixi, like all Sprint phones, cannot do simultaneous voice and data. I refer you to the WiFi rant below.

Display: 2.63" Capacitive Touch Screen, 320x400

A lot to say about this screen. First up, it has 80 fewer rows of pixels than the Pre's 320x480 screen. This means that a large handful of 3rd party apps are incompatible with the Pixi until they're updated. It also means that you just plain have less real-estate for viewing web pages, reading emails, and so on. In practice it's not all that bad, to be honest, but as a Pre user it's noticeable.

The fact that the screen is only 2.63" inches diagonally means that you'll need to hit your targets a little more accurately with your finger. Thankfully it seems clear that Palm was prepared for this from the get-go on the webOS, all the buttons and other UI elements are plenty large on the Pixi. Text is also sufficiently large even for my rapidly failing eyes.

Finally, the screen on the Pixi is in serious need of a brightness boost. It only appears to be about half as bright as the Pre's screen. This is surely a battery saving measure, heck, it might be a heat measure given how much is crammed into such a small space. It's not a deal-breaker for me, I can still see the screen fine at medium brightness, but compared to the Pre the colors look a little washed out. (Note that the difference is not as extreme as the picture above makes it out to be, it's an effect from the camera)

GPS

The Pixi does indeed have GPS and also tower-assisted location. In my testing it picks up both about as fast as the Pre does, which is to say pretty quick. Sprint Navigation is included too, so you get voice-assisted turn-by-turn directions out of the box. Score.

Bluetooth: 2.1 + EDR + A2DP

Bluetooth performance is better than average on the Pixi, both in terms of range and sound quality. As I mention in the webOS 1.3.1 article, Palm has also fixed some bugs with A2DP and it should work with a wider array of devices -- like my car stereo, finally.

Sensors: Light, Proximity, Accelerometer

All three are here. The screen auto-adjusts brightness based on ambient conditions. The screen turns off when you put the Pixi to your face. The screen rotates in some apps (but not, sadly, email) when you turn the Pixi on its side.

Memory: 8 gigs

Palm is of course mum on RAM, if you're wondering about what's there for running apps. Storage-wise, it's nice to see that the rumors of the Pixi only having 4 gigs of internal storage turned out to be wrong.

Ports: MicroUSB, 3.5mm Headset Jack

They're there, they're standard. It's a relief to not have to complain about non-standard ports on Palm devices anymore. USB disk mode works well, Media Sync with iTunes 9.0.2 does not work at all.

Chipset: Qualcomm MSM7627

Palm claims that the Pixi is the first smartphone to use this exact class of chipset from Qualcomm. It's apparently clocked at 600Mhz, but honestly what matters is performance. As I mentioned in the speed section above, it could be better and there's hope that it can be someday if Palm can start using the GPU on the chipset.

I'm not sure where else to mention this, but the Pixi does get warm when charging on the Touchstone, enough to make you take note. I haven't experienced it getting too hot in normal use.

WiFi: none

As Palm fans, we lived through the long time in the desert with the original PalmOS, which was incapable of working well with more than one radio for data at a time. Then, as now, there are a few reasons usually put forth for not including WiFi:

3G speeds are so great now, you don't really need WiFi
For the target market for this device, WiFi isn't a necessity
WiFi costs too much for this device, need to keep the cost down

Initially, with the Pixi, I heard its $100 price point, I looked at how gosh darn tiny the thing was, and then I accepted those three points as valid. A part of me still does: I will be recommending the Pixi to some of my friends and family despite the lack of WiFi.

I'll just say it: leaving WiFi out of the Pixi was a serious blunder. The first really big blunder I've seen Palm make since their resurgence. Every smartphone is a exercise in compromise - the Pixi more so than most because of its small size, but excluding WiFi was one compromise too far.

Battery: 1150mAh

The Pixi uses the exact same battery at the Pre. Palm specs it as lasting for 350 hours of standby time, 50 more than the Pre. That's due to the slightly less power-hungry processor and possibly the dimmer screen. Of course, no webOS user gets those kinds of numbers, which assume no data is coming in or out during that time.

I've only had the Pixi in my hands for about two days, but my gut feeling so far is that the Pixi gets slightly better battery life than the Pre. I'm confident in saying that it should get an average user through an average day of light email, light web browsing, and a few calls. Heavy data users or callers will want to pack a spare battery, just as they do with the Pre.

Who should get the Pixi?

The Pixi is Palm's best attempt yet to broaden their base of smartphone users by picking up former feature-phone users. Its competition isn't meant to be so much the iPhone 3GS, the Droid, or even the Pre - though in reality, of course, they are a healthy part of the competition. Palm wants to position it more as a killer of the 'near-smartphones' out there, your Samsung Instincts and LG Rumors and whatnot. By that metric, the Pixi absolutely wins.

The Pixi is a good phone for anybody looking to step up to a their first smartphone without breaking the bank. As a phone for SMS, IM, some Facebook, and web browsing, it's great and stands well above any non-smartphone or 'near-smartphone.' Centro owners: You are going to love this phone.

Should Pre owners switch to the Pixi?

No.

Wow, really?

Ok, ok, if you're completely over the moon for the form factor, I wouldn't blame you for switching from the Pre to the Pixi. To my mind, however, there are three important compromises in the Pixi that combine to keep me from recommending it to any Pre owner who doesn't wear skinny jeans every day. I've mentioned this in our podcast several times, but it's time I put it down in writing. These compromises are:

Lack of WiFi
Slower processor
Smaller screen

If you remove any one of those three compromises, I might myself seriously consider switching from the Pre to the Pixi for its size and the fact that it has the form factor I like best on smartphones. Taken together, though, they add up to an easy decision for me.

My snarky answer for "Who should get a Pixi" is this: somebody who wants a great smartphone on Sprint but doesn't have the extra fifty bucks to spring for a Pre. $99 after mail-in rebate is a mere $50 less than the Pre on Sprint. For all the reasons I've enumerated above, the Pre is a superior phone when compared to the Pixi. The Pixi's main differentiating feature is its tiny size and the convenience of having the QWERTY keyboard immediately accessible, but let's face it, the Pre is awfully small itself.

Conclusion

Now that I've worked all of the gripes out of my system, it's time to come back to the main thing. The Pixi is a marvel of a little smartphone. It's tiny, fun, and does more than a lot of phones at its price. That price is just very close to the ever-lowering cost of high-end smartphones.

If the Pre didn't woo Palm Centro owners, the Pixi has a much better shot. The only question is whether or not it will achieve its real goal: winning new users who have never used a smartphone. I think it has a shot.

Pros:

Small

No, seriously, it's small!

Only $99

webOS 1.3.1

Cons:

No WiFi

Slightly slower than the Pre

Slightly smaller screen than the Pre

Palm Pixi reviews

2009-12-07T00:46:00.000-08:00

Palm Pixi reviews

By Joshua Topolsky posted Nov 12th 2009 9:00AM

Review

It's hard to believe that Palm is already pushing its second webOS device, the Pixi, out the door. It seems like just a few weeks ago that we were eagerly awaiting the release of the Pre, a phone that was considered to be the last gasp for the badly ailing company, and now it's poised to add an entirely new handset to the mix. The Pixi -- a sleek, tiny device -- seems clearly aimed at the only market Palm has recently enjoyed unfettered success with: the Centro demographic. From the looks of things, the Pixi is positioned to step into the role of the "cheap and cute" smartphone once firmly controlled by the company's previous (and now discontinued) Palm OS offering. Of course, the landscape in 2009 is very different from the landscape of 2007, with fierce competition -- both from outside as well as the company's own sister product. Can the Pixi find a place in the smartphone race, or does it do too little to distance itself from the pack? We've got the answers inside, so read on to find out!

Palm Pixi review hands-on

Hardware

Like the Pre, the Pixi is an incredibly sexy piece of hardware. Whether your prefer larger devices or not, you'd be hard pressed to deny the sheer attractiveness of this phone. The general size and shape certainly calls forth memories of the Centro, but while the previous version was chunky and playful, the Pixi comes off more like its distant cousin... from the year 3000. The plastic device is light, but doesn't feel cheap at all, and Palm has smartly chosen the materials; the front is done in a piano black, high-gloss coat, while the standard back is soft-touch material. The candybar phone has rounded edges much like the Pre, though the width of the Pixi tapers slightly towards the bottom, giving it a sculpted, continuous feel. Unlike the Pre, the Pixi ditches the physical center button for a thin, LED slit which works just as the button does, though sometimes it's a bit odd not having a physical target. Speaking of thin, did we mention what a sliver this thing is? It measures just 0.43-inches thick -- that's thinner than the iPhone (for those keeping count).

As you probably know, you can also pick up Palm's "artist series" of interchangable backs, three of which will be available for pre-order (but not purchase -- they'll be available early December) on the day the Pixi launches. The $49.99, limited edition, Touchstone compatible backs are being released in small batches, and will be replaced with new designs once the initial pieces sell out. A nice touch if you're psyched on customizing your phone, though the first offerings aren't incredibly varied.

The front of the phone is outfitted with a 2.63-inch capacitive touchscreen, and a tiny, full QWERTY keyboard with four neatly arranged rows of Tic-Tac keys. Up top you'll find the power / sleep button (which we found a bit awkward and difficult to push in) and 3.5mm headphone jack, along the right side is a volume rocker and elegantly concealed MicroUSB port, while on the backside you've got the camera lens, small flash, and two speaker vents (though there's only one speaker here). Overall, it's major step up from the Centro, and we'd argue that the Pixi is actually more attractive than the Pre -- certainly the plastic doesn't feel quite as hollow, and decisions about button placement and how to get at the MicroUSB have been noticeably improved. We tip our hats to Palm's industrial design team: they're now two for two.

Internals

The Pixi differs somewhat from the Pre on the inside. Instead of that speedy, OMAP3 CPU the Pre uses, Palm cut down on size and battery drain by using the Qualcomm MSM7627 processor clocked to 600Mhz. We think there are some noticeable differences between the two phones when it comes to performance; the Pixi certainly seemed to struggle at times when pushing pixels around (more on that in the software section). Also onboard is 8GB of ROM / user storage, and an alleged 256MB of RAM. The phone sports EV-DO Rev. A for voice and data, and -- as famously noted -- no WiFi. You'll also find a 2 megapixel camera with LED flash here (a step down from the Pre), as well as an accelerometer, proximity sensor, and ambient light sensor. In all, it's a fine little package, but the slower processor, no memory expansion options, and lack of WiFi certainly are an issue if you're going to go hardcore with this thing.

Display

As we said, the Pixi has a miniature, 2.63-inch capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320 x 400 (80 less than its big brother). One of the huge advantages of webOS is that the UI can physically scale itself to fit screens of varying resolutions, so while the display is tiny on the Pixi, the OS does an admirable job of squeezing into place. Still, that tight screen real estate is definitely noticeable, and though we felt it's certainly usable, this is one of the rare cases where we actually found ourselves squinting at some of the onscreen text. In particular, when you're zoomed out on cards, seeing your content is a bit of a challenge. In terms of color and clarity, the performance was more than passable, though overall we did feel the brightness was slightly lacking on the model we tested. There is a bit-depth difference between the Pixi and the Pre (18 bit versus 24), and while we don't really see anything amiss, there supposedly can be issues with apps hard-coded for the higher depth.

Keyboard

Look, we're just going to say it: the Pixi's keyboard is totally awesome. Admittedly, we weren't expecting fireworks when we first laid eyes on this tiny QWERTY, but the experience of using it day to day has been nothing short of a revelation. You would think that the tight spacing and tiny keys would make typing a difficult task, but Palm has cleverly given the Pixi keyboard snappy tactile feedback and a substantial height boost, making tapping away a serious pleasure. Weirdly, typing on the Pixi keyboard is kind of like using the iPhone keyboard -- they have a similar size, shape, and spacing -- but of course, you've got the advantage of physical keys with the Pixi. While we still wish Palm would step up its autocorrection in the software, we did find ourselves making less mistakes with the Pixi than we do with the Pre, which is saying something. Palm has always had knack for making quality keyboards, and the Pixi's micro size doesn't seem to have held the company back from doing it again. Thanks to this keyboard, we're more convinced than ever that a portrait QWERTY is the most efficient and natural arrangement for physical input.

Speaker / earpiece

The earpiece on the Pixi seemed to be about on par with the Pre -- we don't have many complaints in that department -- but the speaker is a slightly different story. Generally, we found the external speaker on the Pixi to be a bit quiet for daily use on conference calls and the like. It seemed like our audio quality was coming through fine, but the volume on the speaker output just wasn't that loud (we regularly found ourselves reaching for the volume rocker only to realize we'd hit our limit). The same is true for system notifications; thanks to the quieter speaker, we nearly missed a few messages. It's not a deal breaker, but we definitely could have dealt with a bit more volume on our hands-free calls.

Camera

We'll be honest in saying we're disappointed that Palm dropped the camera resolution down to 2 megapixels for the Pixi. Look, we know you want to separate the Pre and this device, but killing image quality isn't a great place to start. In general, the camera takes fine photos, though the flash can be incredibly harsh on some subjects (like white dogs, for instance). As with the Pre, the Pixi has almost no delay between snapping photos, so it's great if you're a busybody when it comes to capturing memories. Of course, also like the Pre you get almost no options for your images (save for flash on or off), and there's no video recording option here. Our verdict is that it's a decent camera for a $99 phone, but we like our gadgets to be a little aspirational.

Software

The first thing you should know about the Pixi and its accompanying operating system -- webOS 1.3.1 (also due on the Pre, though not when the Pixi launches) -- is that it's not terribly different from anything you've seen on the Pre. If you own a Pre (or have recently checked one out... or have read our lengthy review), the experience is largely the same, though there are some new additions that Palm is touting with the Pixi.

Most notable is the availability of Yahoo! accounts for the phone's Synergy profiles. As with Gmail, Yahoo! integration means you pull in the mail, calendar, and messaging content from your account (not fun if you've had a pile of spam messages waiting, like we did). Overall the process is painless, but one note: if you're pulling down a lot of data, the sync process over EV-DO is less than snappy... and you should probably get used to that with the Pixi. We're still not happy that Palm doesn't give you the ability to gatekeep those accounts and weed out the contacts you don't want or need, but Synergy seems to be doing a much better job with keeping everything in one place. Of note in the newer versions of webOS is the ability for Synergy to connect AIM accounts with Gmail or Yahoo! contacts -- functionality that wasn't originally part of the OS.

Palm has also added a Facebook app for the phone, though in terms of functionality, this one ranks fairly low. It's essentially your feed of friend's status updates -- a kind of alternate Twitter really -- where you can also post your status along with links or photos. In our experience it worked well, but we would have loved some deeper interaction beyond updates, like full profile views, for instance. We imagine that Palm will build on what they have here, but if you're walking into this expecting the full experience you get on Android or the iPhone, you'll be disappointed.

Obviously tweaks have been made to get webOS working on a totally different chip than the Pre's, and for the most part Palm seems to have gotten it right. We did, however, run into some frustrating performance issues that made using the phone not just tough, but downright annoying.

It does seem that some of the OS speed has been a causality in the transition to the less powerful CPU, and on a fairly regular basis we experienced freezes, extreme lag, and an unresponsive screen. We didn't have the phone crash out on us, but when transitioning between cards, loading content in web pages, and other basic tasks, the phone had plenty of hiccups. We get the sneaking suspicion that the EV-DO-only connection could be a culprit as well; when you combine a slower processor with a slower data connection, something has to give. We also noticed that email updates and other connected services seemed to be intimately linked with the phone's sleep states -- it didn't seem to be updating as frequently when sleeping, and the EV-DO connection was slow to reconnect for us when waking the device up.

We also saw problems with sleeping the phone and waking it up, with the device not really snapping to life the way you would expect, which then caused us to re-tap the button, which of course meant we put the phone back to sleep. It was an annoying process that felt -- again -- like the phone was being asked to more than it could really handle.

While these problems were fairly regular, moving through cards and apps seemed really speedy on the Pixi -- faster than our Pre in some instances -- and the screen also felt ultra responsive. In fact, scrolling through email and webpages felt more accurate to us on the Pixi, like the screen sensitivity has been cranked up while the kinetic bounces and scrolling have been toned way down.

We walked away from the experience of using the phone day to day somewhat bummed out by the lack of horsepower. While Palm wasn't breaking any world records with the speed of the Pre, it was a consistent, enjoyable experience. The same can't be said about the Pixi -- and we're hoping they can work through this with a software update.

Battery life

In our real-world tests, the battery life on the Pixi was good, but not great. We can't knock the phone too much, as it did seem to perform better than the Pre. Our feeling is that battery life on devices like the Pixi and CLIQ -- always-on, always connected -- is a nut that hasn't been fully cracked. We were able to eke out a day's use on the Pixi, but it was tight, and if we really went for it, a dinner time recharge was in order. We assume -- as with the Pre -- that we'll see some bigger aftermarket batteries for the Pixi, but for now, you'll want to keep your charger on hand and hope that a wall socket is nearby.

Wrap-up

Going into this review, we knew that the Pixi had some cards (no pun intended) already stacked against it. For starters, it's a Sprint device, which would be all well and good if Palm didn't have an extremely similar device on the same carrier for nearly the same price-point. Secondly... Palm has an extremely similar device on the same carrier for nearly the same price-point. We say "extremely similar," but what we really mean is "much faster and better equipped." You can't ignore the fact that not only does the Pre exist, but it has a larger screen with a higher resolution, WiFi capability, a larger keyboard (though not necessarily better in our opinion), a better camera, and a price tag which is dangerously close to the Pixi's. We mean a difference of $50. Now, we don't know about you, but if we were to compare these two side-by-side, the real deciding point wouldn't be that small amount of money (hell, if you're moving up to a data plan, $50 up front should be the least of your concerns). And that's not even taking into account the outside forces at work on potential buyers. A $99 smartphone might have seemed like a steal two years ago, but these days you can have one of the best Android devices on a larger network (the Droid Eris on Verizon), or an iPhone 3G on AT&T for the same price -- so 100 bucks doesn't seem like the crazy value it once was.

No, the real question you'd have to ask yourself when thinking about the Pixi would really be purely about design -- namely, which form factor you preferred. Now -- assuming you're dead set on Sprint as a carrier -- that would be a valid point if one of these phones was, say, a full touchscreen device with no physical keyboard. Then you'd have something. But the fact is that these phones are closely matched in both features and design -- save for those items we just mentioned -- and the Pre doesn't lose out in a single category (unless you consider "smallest" to be a major factor, and even then you don't have a lot ground to stand on). So, why buy the Pixi? Well we're not really sure. Is it for Centro upgraders? Perhaps, but again, the Pre does exist. Palm offers a better device on the same network for nearly the same price... and that's a fact we can't ignore. We think there's a lot of room for evolution in the world of webOS, both on Sprint and (hopefully) with other carriers, and we eagerly await a less lateral move.

Update: As some commenters have pointed out, the Pixi is showing up for $29.99 (after an instant discount) at Walmart online right now. Let's be very clear here -- one of our major issues with this phone was that it doesn't offer enough differentiation from the Pre, a point which is particularly important when there is only a $50 difference between the two. Without question, this phone for $30 is an incredible value and without compare in the world of smartphones. If that kind of price becomes the norm with this device, it would be hard not to recommend it to buyers.