This weekend, Palm launched its second webOS phone, the Palm Pixi. At the same time, the company also released webOS 1.3.1 for Pre owners in the US (other countries will follow later this month). At the same time, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein talked to The New York Times about his company.
The Palm Pixi was launched yesterday. It’s the spiritual successor to the highly successful Palm Centro, but obviously comes with the webOS – version 1.3.1, to be precise. The Pixi (coolest name ever for a phone, if you ask me) is clearly positioned underneath the Pre, with a slower processor, less RAM, a smaller screen, and no wifi capabilities. It is also ridiculously cheap compared to its competition.
The Pixi is aimed at a younger audience than the Pre, and as Rubinstein puts it, “It was designed for people who are transitioning from feature phones and getting their first smartphone.” The first set of reviews are positive, but they do note that this is indeed no replacement or competition for the iPhone, Droid, or the Pre, because of the lower specifications. Update: Gizmodo’s review is pretty negative.
The Pixi comes with webOS 1.3.1, and this version of the innovative mobile operating system has also been released for Pre owners in the US. It comes with quite the boatload of new features, bug fixes, and other improvements, such as support for Yahoo! in Synergy, better email notifications, improved Music applications, and much more. A number of hidden features have already been discovered.
So, where is Palm going with all this? Will the company be able to compete with the likes of RIM, Apple, Nokia, and Android? One of the common complaints is that the webOS simply doesn’t have enough applications yet. According to Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the webOS doesn’t need as many applications as for instance the iPhone. “We are focused on quality over quantity,” he said.
Palm most likely won’t be able to do much about RIM, Nokia, and Apple, but it can do something about the popularity of Android. Rubinstein believes that Android is too focussed on the “techie audience”, and that handset makers are too dependent on “the kindness of strangers” – which would be Google.
“The companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience – the hardware, the software and the services – and aren’t getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together,” he said.
Despite all the uncertainty in the market, Rubinstein (obviously) believes Palm is positioned well. “We did what we said we were going to do,” he said, “We have done a really good job of laying a foundation for the company moving forward. Now we need to move quickly.”
Unfortunately (judging from reviews as it is impossible to get a hold of one unless you live in the us), The pixi is horribly slow and as a result will not encourage people to stick with webos. The Idea is great, the hardware design is great, the software design is good, the overall software experience is average.
Webos already is quite a beast in terms of sucking cpu cycles from powerful processors it must be simply atrocious on the pixi
not including wifi is pretty dumb, i can’t see it adding that much to the size or cost.
$7 apparently… the European version will supposedly have WIFI, but Sprint were too cheap to pay the extra bucks.
so size isn’t an issue if it’s included in Europe, I guess they just decided to cave into Sprint’s demands, I’m sure sprint would rather charge extra with their data plans and prevent people using wifi to make skype calls.
heck, even china has some sort of custom wifi on their iPhones.
OMG, too much concurrency!
Edit: Fixed a typo…
Edited 2009-11-16 20:30 UTC
That’s only a problem on the iPhone. WebOS can multi-task!
Does the Pixi (WebOS 1.3.1) synchronize with iTunes? 😉
I had it, with the Pre. Lag and new issues brought on my 1.3.1…. I tried from the beginning to let Palm work out the bugs.. but when I try to answer a call and it takes over 5 seconds to actually stop ringing after I tell it to pickup.. um no.. DONE with it.. Oh and dont get me started on the Hardware issue with the headphone jack not disengaging headset mode.
So I bought the Hero instead.. and loving every spiteful moment of it..
Sorry Palm, I am now another to jump ship on you…
Are these common issues though? I really don’t think WebOS will overcome the lag issues in the sort term – I hear techie geeks complaining all the time about iPhone not allowing background apps yet that is the very reason the Pre has these sorts of issues. I love the concept of WebOS, and hope they can get past this – my first smartphone was a Palm and I’d like to see them do well with this – but both from battery life and performance perspectives I just don’t think the hardware is ready to support full-on multitasking.
The old “quality over quantity” argument wrt software won’t get them too far either – the Mac community has been screaming that one for years but Joe and Joanne Lunchbucket only want to hear their cousin’s best friend’s hairdresser’s masseuse’s pool cleaner who’s an expert in the field and tells them that they need XYZ model because it’s got all these gazillion apps available for it. They need apps, and lots of them, to keep the “look what new toy I just got” generation happy.
the “look what new toy I just got” generation
Well, from what I’ve seen there is no single generation which has that attitude. There’s both senior geeks and teenage ones, and everything in-between, who just want the latest and greatest toy to play with.
I’m still pretty happy with my old, trusty Nokia 6630
The camera sucks, but otherwise it’s been an awesome phone all these years 
To some degree that’s true – I have a heap of apps on my iPhone that I don’t use often – but everything on there I do use as some point. My sons and daughter-in-law to be (late teens and early twenties) have heaps of junk on theirs that they never use – a lot of them are those stupid free single purpose “tickle your fancy for five minutes” apps, that’s probably the difference, but the point still carries, most iPhone users actively go looking for apps on a regular basis.
“Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.” — s**tmydadsays
Other handset OSs pull off background apps with success.
If Apple are such inspiring developers as some people make out, then I’d have expected them to have found a workable solution rather than simply not implimenting it what-so-ever.
they can do it (apple apps can run in the background) they just dont let other people do it
I’m aware of that (and that jailbroken phones can run 3rd party apps in the background), but that doesn’t change my point.
Rather than implimenting a workable solution for 3rd party developers, Apple just removed the option to them altogether.
Do they? Are you very sure about that? Most OS I’ve used on mobile devices that multitask eat battery life like nobody’s business. Even the iPhone, when multitasking, has poorer battery life. If I listen to music and use other functions my batter goes down way faster. But never as fast as the Win Mobile phones and Nokia phones I have around me. The Android devices I’ve used also crash and burn in a similar usage pattern. I believe Apple should allow multitasking, but I’s rather wait for hardware that is capable of multitasking without compromising my user experience and without leaving me high and dry when the battery fails to last a full day.
all of them are common issues, its really not a usable device yet. This is by jwz in oct (http://jwz.livejournal.com/1108212.html)
In all fairness, when is Zawinski *not* writing a full of drama, and oh-so-very-public farewell letter to some “underdog” project he “used to support”? Jamie is a smart guy. But I take his “farewell” letters with a quarry of salt.
Edited 2009-11-17 19:58 UTC
I don’t understand this. It seems reasonably straightforward. Giving the phone app realtime scheduler priority (schedtool -F, i.e. SCHED_FIFO), real time disk priority (ionice -c 1), and pinning its pages in memory should certainly do the trick. And may even be overkill. If disk i/o is still a problem, make sure that the phone app requires minimal to no disk access at critical times, like answering calls. This doesn’t seem like an insurmountable problem to me. But I’m not a phone software expert, by any means.
Edited 2009-11-17 14:38 UTC
Why not? What are the indications that those issues are irreparable or inherent to the design of WebOS?
Correlation is not cause. If the WebOS has issues with responsiveness, then the reasons are probably a little more complex.
Put in context, the old PalmOS is about on par with the “classic” MacOS in terms of multitasking (cooperative only). And yet even that OS is capable of basic multitasking, running on slower hardware and without the problems that you’re attributing to background apps.
I can’t help but think that Palm went in the wrong direction with the Pixi. Did the Pre really need a low-end sibling? It seems to me that Palm would have been better served developing a Pre 2.0. I get the desire to make a cheaper phone, but the faster/cheaper/smaller progression of hardware would have made the Pre low-end by sometime next year. For a device that started at $200 with contract, there isn’t much of a window for a lower end device 5 months later.
It seems a good move to me. There are a lot of teenagers going after smart phones but they don’t care about WiFi, but they want a quick way to surf the web and send SMS/text messages. A lot of times, they end up with feature phones, as they call them, because of the price.
If Pixi is US$50 more or the same price as the higher priced feature phones, it’s a fairly easy choice. The Palm Centro has sold well because of the US$99 price point.
Im glad my Post about me getting rid of my Pre got people talking about the WebOS and the Devices it runs on.. Please, don’t misunderstand me.. I really wanted the Pre to work for me.. and in order to bring awareness to the platform, we need to make Palm aware of the issues and need to get them to fix them.
Palm is notorious for not being diligent in sending out updates. And I know the the WebOS is in its infancy, but it could have been more polished than this.. I went with the Hero.. and Folks say its slower and more laggy than the Pre.. well.. thats not what I experienced.. the Hero, IMO FWIW, has shown to be responsive and more usable than my Pre.. I gave my Pre 2.5 Months to shine.. and it got worse with time.. every update was a tiny bit better.. but added more issues than it fixed..
ALL devices and OS platforms have their issues.. and some better suited for other people than another.. but Palm, please, do not leave every WebOS user hanging when your not fully utilizing the hardware to its potential. Polish it like the stone that it is..
webos1.3.1 is a solid release.
More speed, more intuitive behaviour, and little gui enhancements here and there.