In a move reminiscent of the Pre launch, Palm has unveiled its second webOS mobile phone today, ahead of Apple’s music/iPod event. The Palm Pixi is a candybar incarnation of the Pre, but is clearly positioned below its big brother; smaller screen, and more worryingly, no wifi.
The Palm Pixi takes a few big steps away from its big brother the Pre. The Pixi comes in the candybar form factor, sporting the QWERTY keyboard underneath the display instead of under a slider. The Pixi is also incredibly small, thin, and light: it’s 10.85mm thin, 111mm tall, and 55mm wide, and weighs in at a mere 99.5 grams. The Pixi is considerably thinner and lighter than either the Pre, the iPhone 3GS, or any Blackberry.
The screen is a 2.63″ capacitive multi-touch display sporting a 320×400 pixel resolution, which is smaller than that of the Pre (3.1″ 320×480) or that of the iPhone (3.5″ 320×480). The multitouch part extends below the screen into the gesture area (a prerequisite for the webOS, it seems), but the centre button of the Pre has been replaced by a gesture area tap. The lower resolution is no problem for the webOS and its applications, as it was designed from the start to handle different resolutions. The multitouch also appears to be slightly more responsive than on the Pre.
First reports indicate that the Pixi’s keyboard is more pleasant to use than that of the Pre, mostly because the Pixi’s keys are taller. In addition, the keyboard sports better tactile feedback.
Inside the Pixi, you’ll find many of the same parts as in the Pre, but with a few key differences – and one glaring omission. It has GPS, 2mp camera with LED flash, 3.5mm headset jack, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 8GB of storage space (~7GB user available), MicroUSB port (both data and charging), proximity sensor, light sensor, accelerometer, ringer switch, and the same 1150 mAh battery as found in the Pre. The Pixi uses a brand new Qualcomm processor: the MSM7627. The exact specifications of this chip are as of yet unknown. RAM figures are unknown too.
The elephant in the room here is of course the lack of a wireless internet chip. In this day and age, this seems like a major feature gap, and I’m not entirely sure why Palm opted for this path. Sure, the Pixi needs to be set apart from and below the Pre, but the smaller and lower resolution screen already pretty much guarantee that.
In the light of positioning the Pixi below the Pre, it seems all the more odd that the Pixi will work with the wireless Touchstone charger just fine, in the same way as the Pre (both require a special backplate). I’d much rather have the Pixi not do Touchstone and have wifi than the other way around. Despite the fact that unlimited wireless data contracts go for 10-15 EUR a month here, the lack of wifi is still definitely a deal breaker here.
The Pixi will be available before the holidays… But only on Sprint for now. So, here we are, two webOS phones, tied to Sprint, and only available in the US and Canada. Us peasants in Europe will have to settle for iPhones and Nokias for now.
To be honest, I rate 3G above wifi on smart phones as, the most purposes, 3G is fast enough, and has better coverage.
In fact, I usually have wifi turned off to conserve battery power.
So all in all, I’d argue that the geeks would miss wifi more than the average consumer (ie the sort of consumer that a device like this would be targetted for anyway).
Edited 2009-09-09 08:56 UTC
It would be dealbreaker for me, but I don’t want to pay for a expensive contract that has a 3G data flatrate.
At the moment I pay 5 Euro even have a landline number on my phone that people can call for cheap. That is all I really need.
BTW I have a HTC Diamond and WinMo itselfs sucks bigtime, but this week they got Android running really well. I guess I will switch to Android before the end of the year. Much nicer and the lack of multitouch is good for my phone
I can’t speak for your country, but in the UK 3G flat rates are very very cheap (mine is a meager £5 “bolt on”)
If you’re planning to switch to Android, then you may find yourself wanting 3G to take advantage of Androids features properly (unless you’re lucky enough to live and work in an area where there are an abundance of free wifi hotspots?)
Edited 2009-09-09 11:00 UTC
Wow. Nice. $30.00 for Data service here. I opted to not have it on my phone, I just use a phone to call people. My wife on the other hand needs it for her iPhone.
Well, seeing as its only available ( for now) in a country where the data plan is very expensive, and not available in countries where its cheap, I’d say the lack of wifi is a major flaw.
I agree. A few months ago, I would have called this a deal-breaker too. My wife recently got the T-Mobile MyTouch. I have noticed that she generally leaves the wifi off (despite a simple button on the main screen for switching it on and off). 3G is fast enough for her needs and we get good coverage at home (no problems with overloading yet).
For me this device looks better than the Pre. The smaller screen is no issue, but no WIFI is a killer for me.
Personally, I need WiFi. I prefer to use my network rather than rely on towers that might get overloaded.
The WiFi, and the small screen are the two big killers for me in this device. Even with the added gesture area, using a capacitive screen at such a small screen is a bad idea. It will register many more misclicks than I would want. It’s inevitable. And the smaller resolution in general, doesn’t help the situation either. Instead of going bigger (I already found Pre’s 3.2″ screen small), they went smaller.
Edited 2009-09-09 08:51 UTC
I don’t care that much about WiFi.
In Europe 3G is more widespread than WiFi, and if you have a nice data contract with your operator, 3G will be more than enough.
My home country (Portugal), is a very good example, almost every university student is now having 3G cards on their laptops.
In Europe 3G is more widespread than WiFi, and if you have a nice data contract with your operator, 3G will be more than enough.
Here in Finland you need to really work hard to find an area where 3G isn’t available. It covers like 90% of the whole country. And the 3G plans are pretty good; you can upload and download as much as you want, with no restrictions, at 256kb/s for only 10 euros a month. That’s not bad.
Of course Wifi is faster, but that doesn’t cover even 1/3rd of the area that 3G does. As such, atleast here in Finland, it doesn’t really change much that they left Wifi out from Pixi.
Oh man. I’d say maybe 20% of our state is covered in anything at all. Of course I live in a desert.
Yes but the phone wouldn’t actually work in Finland, unless you guys use cdma over there. Being a Sprint(cdma) specific phone most smartphone users in the US expect their phone to have wifi access because 3G (especially sprints) service is still spotty at best unless you’re Verizon which has better coverage for the most part. ATT’s coverage has actually gotten better (at least in NYC) and has been getting better slowly. Now when 4G hits they will probably go back to suck status.
While the same thing is true in Sweden, the real problem is insane roaming charges. I also spend time in Not Sweden, and while 3G is ubiquitous there as well it is stupidly expensive to use. If someone offered an unlimited data plan the covered most of Europe, I’d be happy with no wifi, but until then WiFi is rather handy, and I’m loath to buy a phone without it.
Personally, I need WiFi. I prefer to use my network rather than rely on towers that might get overloaded
Well, that must come from someone unhappy she’s be using a phone on a poor network. I’ve been using the Pre on Sprint for a while now, and load is *never* a problem.
At home with wifi available, I don’t see any benefit to using wifi. There is no performance benefit, and I don’t have to go through the pain of switching.
On the road, I don’t have wifi, and honestly, I have yet to miss it. 90% of the time, when I don’t have 3G access, I don’t have wifi anyways.
Please, don’t let your experience with AT&T cloud your judgment. Sprint is not AT&T and overloaded towers are not a problem.
BTW, my Pre blows away my G1 speed-wise. Surfing the internet with my G1 is unbearably slow (wifi or not, must be HW and/or SW). With my Pre, on Sprint, the www is finally usable on the go.
Edited 2009-09-09 15:26 UTC
Given the rising amount of 3G users, that 3G towers are very expensive and that a 3G tower has the same total bandwith than a wifi chip i can see 3G towers getting overloaded pretty easily in the near future.
I personally need wifi for two reasons:
1. I live in a damp spot for 3G signals; they’re very slow and intermittent at my location
2. When I’m at home I want to be able to access services on my network, without having to open them up to the world.
I still think most people on here are forgetting who this phone is targeted at:
As I stated earlier, this phone isn’t really aimed at people like us (ie geeks who have fancy home networks and teh lark).
Most non-nerdy smartphone customers buy their products because it looks cool, they can play silly games, check their e-mails and surf social networking sites on the move. Wifi isn’t really needed for any of those and, at worst, it’s just an added level of complexity for users and battery life.
So for the non-geek users described above, the Palm Pixi is ideal.
For the more technical customer base (like us), there’s still the Palm Pre.
Remember, this isn’t a replacement to the Pre, it’s an additional product to compliment Palm’s smartphone product range.
Fancy home networks?? Wifi networks are not the exception, they are the rule in upper lower class homes in the united states. Wifi not strictly the domain of geeks, as it was back in 2000.
I didn’t say “wifi” specifically, I said “networks” – and that was in responce to the comment regarding network service (ie services attached to wifi that have been set up by the user and NOT the wifi itself)
Most home users would have a couple of computers (excluding router) hooked up to wifi at the most. Maybe two laptops, maybe a laptop and a desktop. But either way, you could usually garentee that neither machine is a NAS drive, intranet webserver, wifi printer, boxes that can/need be SSHed into etc….
So what does teh average person use their home wifi for?
answer: Connecting to the internet – something that can be done on their smartphone anyway without having to enable a battery-sucking wifi radio.
So my point still stands re the average home users not having the kind of wifi network set up that would make them miss wifi on their phone.
Edited 2009-09-10 07:29 UTC
Oh, ok. I didn’t understand all of what you were implying. But still, You’ve already payed once for your own wireless infrastructure. Why pay again to use it through your cell phone?
Because you can’t take your wireless infrastructure on the train/bus/in the car with you.
You can’t use your home wifi connection at work, nor in the pub or any other location away from home.
3G has better coverage than free wifi hotspots (at least here in the UK it does) and it’s dirt cheap (again here in the UK).
I appretiate some countries have crappy 3G coverage – and for them wifi makes total sense. But for here it’s less of an issue.
Well, then when they release it for the UK, that will be a good point. As it is, as I’ve said, its the wrong feature for the wrong market.
Looks like Rubinstein and the folks he raided from Apple are taking the iPhone ideas that Jobs didn’t want and bringing them to Palm. There are old patent apps pics that show this exact unit from Apple a few years ago. This might be the very issue that made Rubi leave Apple. He envisioned the platform with a kybrd, and the OS being Web based, and prob had his team working on making that a reality, while another team was hard at work on touchscreen and a OSX variant. From a usability POV, it is confusing to go from touch to button driven to manipulate the phone, but we’ll see how well Palm can execute on its vision.
Thus far some folks are left wanting more.
Button? Web-based?
The webOS is touch-driven, and not web-based. Especially the latter seems something a lo t of people are spreading FUD about. The Mojo SDK might use web languages, but is still fully capable – except for 3D (at this point, they’re working on it). The SDK gives full access to the hardware, and the Pre apps have absolutely zero in common with the web apps as used on the iPhone pre-SDK.
For how minuscule the physical keyboard keys are, they must be targeting this thing towards children.
Edited 2009-09-09 12:39 UTC
It’s good that Palm are moving at this time. They’re not upstaging the iPod family announcement. They’re getting to market before another Android-based phone does.
Where I live, I have to depend on 3G services because free WiFi is rare and I’m not paying to expose my phone (or computer) to the world. Unfortunately, at about 4000 km east to west, the U.S.A. is a huge country to supply. By the time the GSM vendors have good 3G data service, some will be on 4G service.
We’re going to have choices and that’s a good thing.
2nd device they release and it already has a different resolution. Developers, which WebOS needs desperately, are going to love that one.
Apple has released so far, how many? 3 generations of iPhone, 2 of iPod Touch (plus the new one coming today). All same screen resolution, all one thing less developers have to worry about.
Seems they are learning from Nokia and Microsoft on how to ruin it just on their own.
Edited 2009-09-09 15:57 UTC
The webOS was designed with different resolutions in mind from the get-go. There’s no need to take them into account.
It’s in the article.
There are always incompatibilities, no matter how well a UI engine was designed to accommodate different res.
As for the “3G is just $5 here in Portugal” that someone said, it’s not the same in the US. I don’t need a full contract, since I do 0 to 5 calls per month with my cellphone, but I DO NEED a data service. And in the US:
1. You can’t get a data service without having a full contract, at least not with Verizon/ATT.
2. And even if you get it, it will cost you at least $30.
So yeah, WiFi is needed, no matter what you peeps say.
Edited 2009-09-09 19:35 UTC
… Then the phone isn’t for you? Wow, hard concept. Buy the Pre, it has WiFi.
I love people bitching about lack of features on a phone that they DON’T HAVE TO BUY and has ALTERNATIVES.
The WebOS was designed?
I am talking about what has not been designed yet, man. The apps! Is it not clear by now that the iPhone is all about apps? No matter how good the built-in apps are designed, without developer support it is little more than what an old traditional mobile used to be, even if well designed.
I can think of so many best-seller (and pretty) iPhone apps with an UI that does not accomodate for multiple screen aspect ratios.
No need to take resolutions into account… That is just like saying: the web was designed with multiple resolutions into account. No need to take them into account. There, hear all web designers laughing at your face.
Edited 2009-09-10 00:33 UTC
I, for one, may buy this.
I do not like slider phones, just something to break. I have on issue typing on teeny keypads.
As for the lack of WiFi… If you need it, then the pixi isn’t targeted at you. I have a Treo 800w already and I’ve used the WiFi like… 5 times. If you need wifi for connecting to your internal network at home or at work or connecting to a VPN, want to use your phone as an AP, or just need gobs of bandwidth for some reason, then guess what, There are 50 other phones to choose from.
That actually looks cool in my opinion. I would get it if it came to my carrier.
…where 3G data is cheap and ubiquitous. For the North American market where 3G service is spotty and expensive, leaving out Wifi is a bad move.