The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones No phone in 2018 has attracted as much real-world interest, I have found – and its invariable delight and amazement – as the credit-card sized Palm. By, er, ...Palm. (That's what it's called: Palm. Not Palm One or anything. Just Palm.) Both Verizon and TCL – the Chinese giant backing the project – both attracted some ridicule …
Great idea, but hell no at that price - £100 maybe unlocked. I've actually begun to leave the mobile at home because it's so big it interferes with me doing things (Doogee T5 lite) and it's not even particularly large. Give me this with a sliding keyboard ala HTC touch PRO and I'll happily bite your arm off, up to the elbow.
And what's with the ridiculous prices? £1500 for a phone that costs £195-250 to build inclusive of "underpaid Asian worker tax"? That's not profit it's theft.
quite surprised but perhaps I shouldn't be for the lack of comparison to the HP (Palm) Veer. Almost an identical form factor and target market. It was the last WebOS phone to fully launch (I don't count the Pre3 as it was canceled quite suddenly).
https://www.gsmarena.com/hp_veer-3771.php
The veer was quite cute, and no built in headphone jack though it did have a magnetic attachment to get a headphone jack(and micro USB). It did have a slide out keyboard which this new Palm lacks. It also had wireless charging. No WebOS devices had expandable storage unfortunately.
I don't know what the Veer's sales were like but I remember the comments at the time when the market was going to bigger and bigger screens it seemed crazy to go the exact opposite direction though I appreciate the risk they took trying something different. I bought a Veer myself I think it was basically free when I renewed my ATT contract at the time(was using a Pre3). Never really had a use for the Veer outside of a toy. Ended up giving it to a webos developer a couple of years later.
Still have my ATT Pre3 sitting in a box along with a French language version of the Pre3. My nearly 6 year old galaxy note 3 remains my daily driver and my first Android device.
Well I just took delivery of the Unihertz Jelly Pro off Amazon in black. Amazing little thing - fits across the palm of my hand - just need to get nano sim for it & it'll replace the T5 lite as carry phone. Almost the same spec, LESS than a quarter the size. Good screen and I suspect 3 days battery life with 4G switched off and the usual power saving settings. It's so tiny it's almost too small. Definitely worth the £100 for a phone that'll fit in a pocket and doesn't double up as light artillery ammunition..
Oh look...at the photos in the article: "Alongside an iPhone SE"
Yes, that's right, instead, for a mere £239 purchasing it outright, you could have bought a whole iPhone and it literally just "slightly larger!
An Phone SE with 4-inch Retina display, A9 chip, Touch ID, 12MP rear camera, 720 front camera, 4G LTE2, fast Wi-Fi, 32GB storage, 2+ day battery, etc, etc..
I fail to understand the purpose of this Palm as much as I fail to understand why people fork out £1000+ for an iPhone which they can by for a mere 20-25% of that.
That's not profit it's theft.
It's whatever the market will bare, sadly.
I, too, want a small, usable cell phone, like the 3.5" or 4.0" phones of old. Things you could throw in your pocket, charge every couple of days (or weeks), rather than mini-tablets that struggle to retain a charge for a day, scratch if you breath on them, require hip holsters or special carrying cases, can't be used with one hand, and cost five times what my Nokias did ten years ago.
I picked up a Samsung S7 refurb over the summer for Cdn$200 (about £115), because at 5.1", it was the smallest usable phone I could find. And at 5.1" it boasted about having a "one-handed mode", as if this were an oddity.
Hard to believe that when Steve Jobs rolled out iPhone 1.0, he actually apologized for the size of the overly large 3.5" phone. Today, phones with the word "compact" in their name clock in at 4.7" or larger.
There are 4" phones available out there, yes. But they're universally horribly underpowered and practically unusable. This Palm iteration is practically the only thing I've seen that even tries to be usable.
If it weren't for the fact that my Pebble smartwatch requires an Android or IOS application to connect to the phone, I would probably switch back to my Nokia C3 or 5130.
less than 20GBP delivered...
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Soyes-7S-Dual-Sim-Small-Mini-Android-Smart-Touch-Screen-Mobile-Phone/232721622830?_trkparms=aid%3D555017%26algo%3DPL.CASSINI%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D55149%26meid%3D41675ce80d674442bd36ac59bf5c02b5%26pid%3D101006%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26%26itm%3D232721622830&_trksid=p2045573.c101006.m3226
Surely you jest.
Quick check: my "useless coin pocket" currently holds
- about 7 € in small change, because coffee machines
- a 20 € note because that can come in handy
- a naildriver, because it does everything you could possibly want to do (pop open a beer bottle, rip a parcel open, break the ice in the freezer, dig a hole to plant seeds, emergency sharpening of a blunt blade, open letters, file your nails on the rigged sides for the ladies, you name it -really *).
That is perhaps my most useful pocket!
*and I'm not even Strine! Imagine what THEY could do.
"I've more commonly heard it called the condom pocket."
The one on my jeans was called a "ticket pocket" - which they did very nicely with the old small thick cardboard UK railway and Tube tickets. Even then that was a snug fit. Nowadays tickets have gone from credit card size to airline size.
For many years I've carried either a Swiss Army Knife or a Leatherman Squirt in that pocket.
Anyway, as nice as the phone looks it's FAR too expensive. Anyone who is so worried about missing calls etc whilst out running, at the gym and so on will already have bought either an arm holder or shorts or leggings with a phone pocket at the rear waistband, and a quick check on Amazon reveals that you could buy a midrange Nokia (and no doubt other 'droids) and a fitness watch for less than the price of this phone.
The Victorinox Manager - about 2 1/2 " long, like the Victorinox Classic SD but has a Phillips screwdriver, bottle opener and wire stripper in addition to the sharp knife, scissors, file and flathead driver. Strangely not sold in UK shops but available in Europe and online.
Enough to wire a plug, or slice up some cheese.
Quick check: my "useless coin pocket" currently holds- about 7 € in small change, because coffee machines
- a 20 € note because that can come in handy
- a naildriver, because it does everything you could possibly want to do (pop open a beer bottle, rip a parcel open, break the ice in the freezer, dig a hole to plant seeds, emergency sharpening of a blunt blade, open letters, file your nails on the rigged sides for the ladies, you name it -really *).
I have to admit that I'm jealous — even though I wear "old-school" relaxed-fit jeans (plain old women's Levi's), the coin pocket on mine is nowhere near that large. It mostly just acts as a place to temporarily stash one or two keys or the 4cm-wide keyfob; it's too narrow for anything else.
a naildriver, because it does everything you could possibly want to do
If you have a moment, would you mind sharing the make and model of the naildriver? I've gone through a lot of pocket tools and settled on, basically, a folding knife because most of the others weren't useful. Something less stabby and alarming to coworkers would be appreciated.
Something less stabby and alarming to coworkers
That is the very reason why I switched from centerpunch to nailpunch. I do own a couple of them of various makes due to the security drones at airports sometimes insisting that they are weapons (since, you know, they are made of steel - don't ask) and thus discarding them.
I usually go with whatever I can find at the local hardware store in the 10-cm range or so. Right now I carry a MacAllister but I'm pretty sure that's a French store brand. They look very much like Silverlines. When I was in Northern America I liked Fuller ones. Very durable if a bit expensive compared to store brands, and the square-ish head is actually quite pleasant.
My current phone is a Sailfish. My next phone - which I ordered on ebay and should arrive shortly - is also going to be a Sailfish. Why?
- privacy by design
- apps in store are all open source
- very fast
- easy on the battery
- gestures work extremely well
- full Linux system
For the apps where you cannot find a native counterpart, you have the option of running Android apps.
> linux is a Finnish originated OS.
Erm... not exactly.
The Linux Kernel started as a clone of an American OS led by a Finish bloke with many international contributors, with much of the user space written thanks to the American-originating GNU project (also with many international contributors)
or so I've Hurd.
I'm sure someone will be along to correct me if I'm mistaken.
In fact it motivated me to dig out my Ray, I dropped it from Marshmallow to Kitkat and it's stable again. I couldn't get microg to install so google play services are eating up 1/3rd of my RAM but it's running enough apps to be useful and Evie launcher makes it look modern.
"...thoroughly fed up with the large, heavy attention-sucking monsters that smartphones have become...
...many long for the simplicity and small size of the feature phone of yesteryear."
Amen to that!
We would love a flip or slider phone with buttons again, with a more robust & water resistant case. Think Motorola RAZR but with 4G and dual SIM.
The touchscreen thing has its uses but having to take it everywhere is such a pain: bulky, difficult to use with disability/single-handed/with gloves on and expensive to drop kerbside. Having a companion phone when that suits best is a great idea.
But it needs to be done right - it cannot be just a miniature Android - it needs to offer something else; something it's counterpart does not do.
The Palm doesn't seem to have done this: no buttons, lacklustre battery life and no maybe no call recording (now being ditched by Android). Other valiant but poorly supported efforts like the HTC Mini+ and SocBlue A850 arguably came closer.
Perhaps using a simpler, lower cost device as a primary, complemented with a beefier touchscreen partner when desired, is the best way forward?
Has anyone found an operator that will let you have two phones with the same number active on the same network at the same time ?
That is indeed the issue - and I vaguely recall having read that (IIRC) Vodamoan did indeed have this facility, at a price, and with limitations. If it was Vodamoan then it makes sense them having grabbed the UK rights to it.
However at £350 they are avvin a larf. If I wanted a second phone for when I'm oout and about and don't want to risk my main phone - I'd want something cheap so I'm not too fussed when it disappears in the midden, gets dropped and stood on by a cow, or whatever.
The GSM specification allowed for SIM1 and SIM2 on a single account (original use-case was to allow a carphone and a mobile phone - this was the days before Bluetooth). Only Vodafone ever implemented it, and even then they never really publicised it.
Easy to see why, really, when they can sell you the same call-and-data allowance twice under the current scheme...
Which clearly is ridiculous, as a secondary phone why would I want to pay nearly double what I spend on my main handset?
This is just something to take out to the pub right? The small battery, ability to call and maybe an app or two and I'm sorted, but it's about £280 too expensive.
I'll await the might of AliExpress and Banggood to develop their thirty quid alternatives...
If I wanted a credit card-sized phone, I still have my previous Symbian phone - and it (still) runs for a WEEK between charges, not for a day. It still isn't running anything I didn't install* on it, and that goes equally for my current Galaxy, or anybody's smartphone. So no, I still don't see the point.
* Yes, yes, technically it does have some pre-installed software some of which indubitably wakes up and runs some code in the background every now and then. Except I can't really tell, because as long as I don't use them and do not register accounts with any of them none of them are ever doing anything visible**, and I'm fine with that.
** Potential snooping is a whole different ballgame, and not what we're discussing here. This is supposed to be about how allegedly annoying, harassing and impossible to reign in smartphones are in contrast with dumbphones.
I still have my previous Symbian phone - and it (still) runs for a WEEK between charges, not for a day.
I had a Symbian smartphone, and it was small and wasn't really that nice to use, but I'll give you the battery life was decent. But like for like, not much has changed if you shop carefully and have a similar use case. My current smartphone gets light use, has the minimal amount of vampireware running (although still using Xiaomi's full fat AOSP and Google "Services") and at a push I can get six days between charges - with the important difference to any Symbian I've used that it is very fast, it has access to the full range of Android apps if I want them, and can do stuff like credible satnav, gaming, act as a torch, a GPS etc.
And unlike the Symbian devices, I've got a 6+ inch high resolution screen, an impressively fast Snapdragon 845, and it cost me £260. And that's a half-premium version - I've just sold my last handset that still ticks most of those boxes, and I could now buy a new one for about £120.
On one pair of my jeans that pocket is a snug fit for an old-style small cardboard railway/Tube ticket. No way anything with any thickness is going to fit - never mind the restricted width. A pocket watch would need a bigger pocket - which now explains the much larger pocket on another pair of jeans.
£75 with an ePaper screen, just take my money! I wanted a YotaPhone for the epaper screen, but not for the rest of the phone. It would be ideal to compliment my snazzy top-end awesome flagship, somewhat limited video abilities, rudimentary framing etc for the camera, tiny pocket convenience, 4 weeks battery, bloody awesome.
Not if done by your operator, that's the initial business model for this phone and why it's locked to a provider. This was explained in the previous article when Verizon launched it in the US:
Inside is a non-removable nano SIM that mirrors your primary SIM, much like an eSIM-enabled Apple Watch mirrors your iPhone.
But from this article it sounds that Vodafone is not offering this feature yet.
As much as I can see potential uses of a phone with a small form-factor, the lack of battery life completely kills the utility of this particular example.
(And TBH, do you really need or want a fully fledged Android experience on a handset this small? Far better to run something with lower overheads, and reduce the battery drain at the same time)
Vodafone might not be your friend, here is a slightly different iteration by LTE;
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Mini-Phone-AIEK-X6-Color-Screen-Cell-pone-Ultra-Thin-Mobile-Phone/32689026290.html?spm=2114.search0104.3.9.55c87773MdT0Vb&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_4_10065_10068_10890_10547_319_10546_317_10548_10696_453_10084_454_10083_10618_10307_10820_538_10303_537_536_10059_10884_10887_100031_321_322_10103,searchweb201603_51,ppcSwitch_0&algo_expid=36879c34-1dc8-4b08-bd26-4060013bd048-1&algo_pvid=36879c34-1dc8-4b08-bd26-4060013bd048
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No, not this gimmick. How about a 16x9 or 4x3 5-inch bezel-less phone with a headphone jack, a recent Bluetooth stack and DAC, an 835 or better CPU, and Gorilla Glass 4 (because 5+ gets scratched when you look at it sideways). 128GB, because it's almost 2019. A small phone likely won't have room for an SD card slot or removable battery. That's forgivable, so long as it's waterproof. Also, a useful battery and being easy to hold is way more useful than being razor-thin. With a composite plastic body (ok, very 2013) you won't even need a protective case.
I would love to see a manufacturer take a gamble of "function over form" like this.
I'm still slightly puzzled by the attention this little gadget is attracting. It must be at least four years ago I acquired a phone-cum-Bluetooth-headset which is genuinely tiny. It was a bit of a gimmick; build quality wasn't great (Chinese) and it died when the battery expanded and pushed the back off—but it worked.
The dormant device is in front of me now. It's 7cm long, about 2.2cm wide and about 12mm thick. It has a full dialler keypad, μUSB and a midi-SIM slot. It looks very much like any old dumbphone but vastly shrunken. You could use it as a phone in its own right or it would act as a Bluetooth headset for a separate phone; it is so small that with a little plastic loop it hangs directly on the ear.
Like I said, a gimmick, not as useful as I'd thought it might be, but an interesting one at that: and I believe I've seen very similar-looking items in the neon-tat-crap shops on our high street just recently.
So what exactly is the hype about, here? Another device that's a bit too much of a compromise to be useful? Or am I missing something?
People complaining about the price of this thing need to think a little bit about economies of scale. This is the reason that even the cheapest smartphones are now 5" plus and use many common components. Making something this far outside of "normal" costs more. It's simple economics - smaller does not mean cheaper.
BTW - I used one of these briefly a few weeks ago and it's cute but a bit of a gimmick in my view.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2011/02/02/blackberry_7200.jpg
- and even that has got some crap on it that I never wanted (the game, and internet connectivity)! Absolutely lovely phone, excellent battery life, and even though I didn't even want the internet on it, I did use it once, to sneak a peek at Spaceship One at work when I should have been doing other stuff rather than keeping tabs on a historic sub-orbital flight in 2004.
Sorry, but the Palm Palm in the review is pure ripoff - and a sad comment on how featuritis has turned a useful concept - the mobile 'phone - into over-featured nearly unusable overpriced crap. IMHO, of course.
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