Preliminary Palm Pixi Review

As of November 15th, the Palm Pixi has been at large.  The question on most people’s minds are how it stacks up against the Palm Pre.  Palm has obviously attempted to make a few trade offs in order to appeal to a different demo.  The way I see it, the Pixi will be to the Pre what netbooks are to the laptop: an abbreviated, cheaper, more portable version of the hardware with the same operating system and a longer battery life; designed for people that prefer, well, abbreviations.

The Palm Pixi’s most noticeable difference is its slower processor.  The Palm Pixi’s Qualcomm MSM7627 processor clocked to 600Mhz pales in comparison to the Palm Pre’s OMAP3, but the trade-off here is a longer battery life.  Battery life is really a measurement of portability, making Pixi already more portable, although a bit sluggish.  Being a Pre user, I already feel like webOS can be sluggish at times.  This brings us to the next Pixi Perk: the only phone with the latest webOS software: version 1.3.1

With version 1.3.1 of the most advanced mobile OS on the planet, there are promised revisions in code to make things work more efficiently, which helps to cancel out the processor downgrade a bit.  While the Pixi enjoys webOS 1.3.1, Palm Pre has to wait, an obvious value-add tactic from Palm in hopes to give Pixi a little traction in the most hostile environment for new smart phone releases in the short history of mobile devices.

The other 1000-pound-gorilla-in-the-room-trade-off we see here is a reduced screen size in order for the phone to be thinner than the iPhone; this trade off is thanks to a full QWERTY keyboard that doesn’t add to the thickness of the phone by being a slide-out, but by taking up the real estate where the screen would be otherwise.  If you’re like me and need a real QWERTY, then this trade-off is ridiculously poor.  Most people I know would take the 3.1″ Pre screen over the 2.65″ Pixi screen even if it meant a few more centimeters in width.  If you don’t care about having a real keyboard, and you don’t mind paying 40% on average more a month, then you should go with iPhone.

Oh yeah, and iPhone has about a thousand percent more apps.  Probably more.  You really get what you pay for in this deal, although I’m sticking with Palm still.  The apps are catching up, and most of my friends with iPhones admit that they only use a couple percent of their apps anyway, but of course, that’s all anecdotal (just trying to avoid those dogmatic iPhone fan boy mantras in the comments).

Palm Pixi vs. iPhone 3Gs

Palm appears to be releasing a device that has all the perks and sexiness of Palm Pre’s webOS functionality (what I consider by far the most advanced mobile OS on the planet) but with the solidity of design of past Palm winners (Treos, Centro).  I’ve had my own Palm Pre Complaints, even to the point of my having to return my Palm Pre to the Sprint Store.  The vast majority of the complaints I’ve heard and have had myself about the Palm Pre are constructional issues, a poor design with the sliding keyboard mechanism that wears out the connection to the touchscreen, or giant cracks appearing on the face suddenly after hours of removing the wrapper.

The Palm Pixi appears to have no moving parts and still has a real tactile keyboard (a must for me and many others I know that are less concerned with games and watching stuff and more concerned with getting things done).  The keyboard looks bigger than the Palm Centro’s, perhaps may I hope, back to the Treo 700 keyboard?  I’m guessing not, but one can hope.  I know what you’re thinking, why would I want to hail back to one of the chunkiest phones since the Zach Morris “Mobile” Phone?  Because this thing is going to be oh so thin… .05 inches thinner than iPhone 3Gs!  That’s like a whole other business card you could be carrying in your pocket if you switch from iPhone 3Gs to Palm Pixi come this holiday season.

It appears that the phone will have a nice little 8 GB solid state flash drive on board, and I’m not sure but with Palm’s track record I doubt there will be a 16 GB option like the Apple offering.  The Pixi’s touchscreen in the demos appear to be just as responsive, if not more, than the Palm Pre, bringing life and purpose to webOS on board.  An added possibility that I’d be willing to soil my pants over; the back is reportedly as soft as the replacement backs for the Palm Pre and Touchstone.  That would mean that they would be touchstone ready, so chumps like me that already have two touchstones will be able to switch over to the Palm Pixi with less travail.

Again, Palm Pixi relinquishes major touchscreen real estate with a real keyboard, where iPhone brings a beautiful full sized keyboard with the inconvenience of a virtual keyboard.  So it’s really up to your priorities.  That’s a nice balanced way of putting it, but come on, that marble game on iPhone (and also our childhoods) where you tilt the ball through a treacherous holey maze is great but gets old after 10 minutes.  Trade that for the ability to type text messages, web sites, addresses in google maps, etc with at least 33% more speed (conservatively) because of the real keyboard, not to mention the ability to do it all simultaneously because of a multi-tasking OS?  We’ll leave that up to you.

One thing iPhone will almost always have over Palm products and their newer webOS platform is a much greater App development support community.  Their library of Apps might always be greater, but as Palm releases access to more developers to distribute directly through their App Catalog, we’ll see how Palm’s more liberal paradigm will play out in App variety.  I’ve been pretty disappointed so far with the time it’s taken for the App catalog to grow, but what do I know about these kinds of rollouts?  Nada.

Most of the other differences boil down to the differences between most Palm and Apple products.  The Palm Pixi has the normal volume buttons and mute switch on most Palm phones.

I’m hoping Pixi is a little snappier than Pre.  I’m spending my young adult years wating for my emails to open.

When's this coming out?

It is still unknown exactly when the Palm Pixi will be released.  You’d have to be crazy to believe that they’d wait until after the Holiday season to release, so guesses are landing around late October/Early November.