Apparently robotic hamsters are the cute must-have gift this Christmas, but, as they’re in short supply, the Palm Pixi might make a good alternative.
Palm’s newest smartphone, made available on November 15 on the Sprint network in the US, has a cuddly form factor you can almost fit in your palm and an interface to coo over.
Holding the curved and light Pixi in one hand and my hard-edged and heavy Motorola Droid in the other was like looking at Beauty and the Beast.
The Pixi’s touchscreen is much smaller than the Droid’s but it responds better, with only delicate strokes needed, and, rather than double-tap zoom, it has multi-touch pinch-and-zoom implemented.
Palm’s webOS operating system and interface also look more refined than the Droid’s bare Android implementation.
I should probably end the comparisions there though, as the elfin Pixi is not really meant to compete with the heavyweight Droid.
Palm’s description pitches it more as “smartphone lite” – a less sophisticated version of the Palm Pre, but a major advance on the Palm Centro.
“It’s designed to appeal to people who are active social communicators, who prefer SMS to email, love to Tweet, and are frequently posting status updates on popular social networks such as Facebook,” says its reviewers guide.
The notifications of new emails and messages are informative pop-ups on the screen and there is good integration with a Facebook widget. Twitter is curiously absent though, other than through the Universal Search feature.
I found the Search feature to be the easiest way onto my favourite websites, given the limited functionality of the browser. Unlike the slider keyboard on the Pre, the Pixi has a narrow, but surprisingly usable and accurate, physical keypad under the screen to type in your request and let Google, or Google Maps or Wikipedia or Twitter do the job of finding what you need.
Video playback over YouTube was well formatted, the speaker does a decent job and music can also be transferred to the device and listened to through a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.
There is 8Gb of internal memory, which cannot be expanded with an SD card.
Like the Pre, battery life is disappointing – this phone will not get you through the day. There is an attractive “touchstone” accessory though that allows you to place magnetised versions of the phone’s shell (including ones with specially commissioned artists’ designs) onto a plinth, allowing it to be charged without needing to be plugged in through the fiddly USB hatch.
While I had no problem with the small keyboard, I did find the small screen limiting in viewing web pages. The processor is less powerful than the Pre’s and did produce some lag between apps.
The Pixi’s 2-megapixel camera produces acceptable pictures, but does not record video. The phone also has no Wi-Fi.
In summary, the Pixi is light and delightful, but a little too lightweight on features for power users. It is priced accordingly - $100 with a two-year contract, compared to $150 for the Pre and $200 for the Droid.
As to whether the Pre and now the Pixi can bring about a major revival at Palm, the jury is still out. Ashok Kumar, analyst at Northeast Securities, gave a gloomy prognosis last week, reporting that the Pre suffered a substantial decline in sales in October, according to his checks.
“It appears unlikely that the launch of Pixi will reverse this negative trend,” he said, in a note.
“WebOS has negligible smart phone OS share, 0.2 per cent per Gartner estimates, and is unlikely to attract any meaningful third party application support. Palm has bet the farm on WebOS and there is a real possibility that they may not achieve critical mass.”
