Palm phone – Doomed experiment.

A resurrection best not practised

• The Palm brand (now owned by TCL) has launched a new device which is arguably more useless than cellular in the Apple Watch as it adds cost for the user and solves no problem that the user is ever likely to have.
• Palm used to rule the personal digital assistant (PDA) space 16 years ago and its latest wheeze under the umbrella of TCL is a tiny smartphone that is meant to be the user’s secondary phone.
• Palm is seeking to create a niche that it thinks may have opened up as a result of smartphones becoming so large that they are uncomfortable to carry without a large pocket such as a jacket or a handbag.
• Enter the new Palm device which is a tiny device with a 720p 3.3” LCD screen with Gorilla Glass 3, a midrange Snapdragon 435 processor running Android 8.1.
• This device can do most of the same things that a regular Android phone can do but will start to fall over when it comes to photos, videos and games.
• The idea is that the user pairs this with his existing phone (iOS or Android) and then when he wants to be free of the device he just takes the Palm in order to keep in contact.
• The device works well with the iPhone with the exception of iMessage which won’t work.
• iMessage use among iPhone users in USA is very high meaning that this device is almost certainly a no-go for half of all smartphone users in USA.
• The device requires a further contract with Verizon which costs $10 per month which allows Palm to have the same network access as the user’s regular device to get around the syncing issues.
• The device’s small size has meant that battery life is very limited meaning that using it to track a workout and play music results in the battery being dead in three hours.
• This is the problem with using Android as the OS has been designed for devices with much larger batteries meaning that the software has not been optimised for use with such a small battery.
• Arguably the device might have been better off using Android Wear.
• The real issue as I see it is the simple fact that users almost always have their devices on them and will go to great lengths to retrieve their devices when they have been left behind by accident.
• Smartphones have become much more robust and waterproof since Bendgate (see here) in 2016 meaning that carrying a device in a back pocket is a much less hazardous exercise than it was two years ago.
• Furthermore, modern smartphones have plenty of features to silence them and to give the user simple ways not to be distracted all the time.
• Consequently, I can see no use case for this device which combined with its astronomical price tag of $350 + $10 a month for the subscription leads me to think that it will sink without trace.
• To put this into context, for this price users can buy a wearable that does the same thing or even the Pocophone F1 from Xiaomi which has a huge screen and flagship specifications for a very low price.
• This experiment looks doomed to failure underlining that some things should not be resurrected.