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.

The Palm Pixi is just what you’d get when you ask your engineers to take the Pre, keep as much stuff as possible, but make it smaller. It’s a keyboarded candybar (with webOS), but it loses some vitals like Wi-Fi.

The Details

The important bits: It still runs webOS, still has a keyboard, still only for Sprint (for now) and can pretty much do everything the bigger Pre can do. There’s no Wi-Fi, but GPS and the accelerometer are still there. The Pixi is slightly lighter than the Pre, losing a lot of weight from not having to slide itself out to reveal a keyboard, but has a little bit of a lobotomized brain. Palm wouldn’t get into details, but you can make out from the hints and insinuations that the CPU and the RAM were less of what you’d get with the Pre.

What you’d miss the most is the 80 pixels they had to shave off because of the smaller display. At 2.63 inches, all the Pixi can handle is a 320×400 resolution. This translates into more work for developers, who need to somehow manage two different resolution sizes as well hardware different specs if you want your app to run on both phones. Oh, and there’s a 2-megapixel camera as opposed to the Pre’s 3-megapixel camera.

Hands-on Impressions

The Pixi’s handlers didn’t give people a chance to manhandle the phone very much, despite my attempts at charming them by both showering and brushing my teeth beforehand, so the impressions are limited to some typing, some navigating and a lot of eyeballing. What I saw was good. It’s the same OS, so you can do everything you could do before, but the ball is replaced by a touch “area”—the same area you’d use for the off-screen forward and back gestures before. Just tap it and you get the same effect as the Pre. And in all the apps I saw there wasn’t a huge difference in speed between the two devices.

What’s most surprising is that even though the keyboard is technically smaller on the Pixi than on the Pre, each key is more raised because there’s no sliding lid to maintain clearance of. So even though the keys are slightly different and smaller, I was able to thumb out words faster and with fewer errors than before. High five.

Overall, it’s definitely slimmer, lighter and more pocketable than the Pre. It has almost all the same features—no Wi-Fi won’t affect your ability to download apps or music—so you’re not missing on that much stuff if for some reason you choose the Pixi over the Pre. But when asked about whether or not you can run the same number of apps simultaneously, multitasking, as on the Pre, I was once again met with what amounted to “no comment.” Think of it like a less pricey computer.

What’s To Come

Palm is targeting the Pixi at the cheap man segment, the person for which $200 or $150 is too much for a phone, but something a little less is just right. (This person also wouldn’t recognize that any difference would be dwarfed by the monthly phone bill anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.) No concrete details on the price, but it’s definitely going to be less than the $150 of the Pre.

There was no concrete launch date yet, but Palm’s aiming for sometime “before the Holidays”. The Pixi will come loaded with a native Facebook app as well as Synergy integration with LinkedIn and Yahoo. For those of you who like customized backplates, there will be a limited edition run of five artist-designed Touchstone-compatible backs just for you, provided you’re among the people who order the limited edition backplates in time.

No idea what kind of Zima-based shenanigans are going on in Sprint’s marketing department today, but that less-than-impressive $100 Palm Pre service credit promotion was all apparently a mistake, according to John Paczkowski at the Wall Street Journal. Sprint says the promotion was put into the system by error and has since been pulled and canceled, although customers who signed up during the glorious six hours the deal was live will still get the credit — and if you act fast enough, you might still be able to get in, because the promo is still live as we write this. Amazing.

[Thanks, fresh]

Filed under: Cellphones

Sprint backtracks, cancels $100 Pre service credit offer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already seen the Palm Pre dip below its $199 list price during a few limited, occasionally inadvertent sales, but it looks like it could soon be dropping well under the $200 mark for a slightly longer period of time — at least if a purportedly legit leaked document is to be believed. According to PreCentral, the doc comes from someone working at a Sprint “indirect partner retail dealer,” and quite clearly indicates that “indirect partners” will be able to sell the Pre for $149.99 (after a mail-in rebate) between September 8th and October 31st, 2009. Presumably, Sprint itself would also be offering the Pre for the same price during that time and, if the HTC Hero’s $179.99 price tag on Sprint is any indication, there seems to be at least a decent chance that the price drop could eventually become a permanent one. Either way, we won’t have to wait too long to see how this one pans out.

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm Pre rumored to be dropping to $150 on September 8th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know, sometimes if you just study hard, keep your nose clean, and stay away from the pirate cable TV business, fate will do you a solid. For instance, check this post by PreCentral forum member go4craig. Today, the hapless youngster innocently applied webOS Doctor in a bid to reset his phone back to factory and wouldn’t ya know it? When all was said and done, the phone’s operating system was upgraded to webOS 1.2. And what’s more, the maneuver has been repeated successfully by a handful of other forum members.

What can the accidental early adopter expect for their trouble? How about account information for the App Catalog (a sign of paid apps to come), a Select All option in the browser’s edit menu, and some changes in GPS location services. In addition to all this inadvertent newness, the update is said to have “much improved (zoom animation)” and a number of “little tweaks throughout.” Sadly, as of this writing the gang at Palm seem to have plugged the leak. But chin up, little ones — we’re sure an official release must be imminent.

[Thanks, Jay]

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm webOS 1.2 leaked, plugged in record time originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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