Remember Palm Pilot? Investors thought the Palm with webOS would revolutionize the smartphone industry. HP couldn’t make it work and today anything Palm is little more than a niche in history.
If Phoenix rises from the ashes then so can a bit of yesteryear. Palm is back, baby. Think iPhone SE price in an updated and tiny Nokia 3310 package. As much as I love iPhone Xs Max, I want one.
Smaller Than Small
Unless Apple has another iPhone SE up its sleeve, the last great small iPhone might be the 4.7-inch iPhone 8. Yes, iPhone customers are howling in pain at the thought of carrying around a Mac in your pocket, but that’s what iPhones today are. Power in the pocket.
How do you compete with Apple? Build something Apple won’t build. Chinese knockoff maker TCL bought the Palm brand a few years ago and introduced what some are calling the Palm Palm. Palm? The display is less than palm sized.
Palm Palm is not a guy phone. It’s an Android-based touchscreen smartphone that comes with decent specifications wrapped up in a diminutive package, Nokia styles. The display is 3.3-inches. How does that compare to smartphones today? iPhone Xs Max is 6.5-inches. The original iPhone was 3.5-inches. The discontinued iPhone SE was 4-inches.
We’re talking small, folks. Small.
Palm seems to understand that the world already has enough large smartphones, so the Palm Palm is a companion phone to whatever you own now. It has a very respectable Retina display with 445 ppi (not far from Max), 32GB storage, 3GB RAM, eight0core Qualcomm Sanpdragon 435, a 12MP rear camera, and an 8MP selfie camera. Plus, USB-CI, Wi-Fi, GPS, LTE, Bluetooth, and iPhone-like IP68 water and dust resistance.
Of course, this is an Android smartphone and it only runs Android 8.1 Oreo, so it’s not exactly the latest and greatest. It’s also exclusive– for now– to Verizon which bills it as a companion to your current smartphone.
Companion? A $350 companion that is more iPhone SE-like than iPhone XR which retails at more than twice the price. The question to ask is obvious. Why? What’s the benefit to having two smartphones? Or, could you live with a single palm-sized Palm device nicknamed Palm Palm.
Good golly, Molly. It is adorable. I’m not sure what I would do with it other than play around and show it off. But I want one.
gberger says
Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at 4:17 AMFor those of us who do not have regular phones, but must depend upon wireless (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.) for our primary means of communicating, a small fit-into-the pocket phone is to be preferred.
Also, as the population ages, having a small-sized phone will become more prevalent.
Just a thought
Ben says
Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at 5:16 AMOther end of the scale here… senior with man hands and aging eyes needs a phone with a big display, big buttons, big apps.
I’m rather certain gentrification will not lean toward ever smaller phones. The trend is the other way. Big.
gberger says
Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at 9:34 PMBen,
Sorta’ gently have to disagree.
I’m 95, have bad eyesight and arthritic hands.
I have difficulty holding and using my son’s iPhone X, much less a larger one.
My SE keeps me going.
YMMV