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Palm is back... um, or wtf

Someone purchased the rights to the Palm brand and released a 3.3" phone... that requires that you already have a phone. Something like a pocket smartwatch maybe?

https://www.techradar.com/news/palm-...for-your-phone

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

It sounds interesting but... my oh my, Techradar! What a horrible design! It started showing the article and I even managed to read the first paragraph, then it popped up a huge banner "I see you are in the UK", followed by an even huger popup forcing me to accept their privacy nonsense... In short, I never got to read it. But I am sure it is interesting.

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

Is this basically the same thing only without the annoying blockers?

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

This is great. Hope to see more vendors going full smallPhone.

Now we just need a world wide version and my $50 from jolla and I’m good to indiegogo.

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

Here's the techradar article text, which almost -- but doesn't quite --make complete sense.

Quote:

Remember Palm, the almost-king of the early smartphone race? Well, it's back...sorta. And with a very unique, very unusual new handset.

First – the resurrection of Palm. This is not the Palm of old – the new device shares none of that old engineering team that brought us, for example, the Palm Pre.

Instead, it's a new device from a San Francisco start up that has simply purchased the rights to the brand from TCL for its own new ideas.

Secondly, the phone itself. It's as much a phone for your phone, as it is a phone for you.

Palm by name, palm-sized by nature
At a mere 50 x 97mm in size with a thickness of 7.4mm, it's a tiny thing – like a few credit cards stacked on top of each other. In an age of giant screen phablets as the new standard, Palm's approach is different – it's designed to be a second phone, with a 3.3-inch LCD display packing a high-res 445 ppi.

But, and this is where things are really unusual, not a standalone second phone. Being sold exclusively in the US by the Verizon network, the provider is selling it in the same way as it approaches wearables, as a $349.99 add-on.

Quote:

So, though the new Palm has its own data plan, it also piggy-backs off your main smartphone, sharing the network's NumberShare tool to make for a single number across devices, and the Verizon Message+ app to sync your texts across both devices too.

Running a forked version of Android 8.1, it has a number of unique software features including a gesture-based single virtual button for navigation along its bottom, a scrolling hexagonal-pattern based apps grid, and a search system that lets you scribble letters onto the screen in one of the few ways this phone resembles the original Palm line up..

With Android underpinning it then, it's a better fit for accompanying another Android phone and its shared services than an iPhone, though it'd ostensibly work with both.

Who's it for?
Trying to figure out exactly who this is for seems challenging, but Palm sees a niche for those that want a device that lets them escape the constant notifications of their own handset, without cutting out the mod cons.

So there's a dedicated 'Life Mode' (which to be honest sounds just like an airplane mode, really) that turns on a do not disturb-like setting and limits connectivity options, doubling therefore as a batter saving option. With an eight-hour normal lifespan per charge, it's going to be needed.

Elsewhere there's Gorilla Glass 3, 32GB storage, 3GB RAM, IP68 water and dust protection, 12 and 8MP rear and front cameras respectively and, despite the act it's intended as a respite from your daily phone hell, access to all the Android apps you've come to expect.

A curio indeed then. And, at least while the Verizon exclusivity lasts, likely to sell just as well as the last few Palms that have come before it.

It's got the same photo of Steph Curry as the BBC story (cropped a little more).

The only reason to get one of these that I can think of is if you have one of those 5.5"+ phones, and you need something you can fit in the pocket of your tighter pants ;) With one of these things and the "NumberShare" thing the article mentions, you don't need to swap SIMs.

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

Off topic but that privacy banner/overlay stuff is added via JavaScript from a domain called consensu.org. Amazing how many websites work a lot faster without enabling all the 3rd party scripts that are loaded by websites like this by default.

Umatrix blocked it by default, but you can also use the element picker in unlock origin to hide it with just a couple of clicks.

...of course that only works if you can run Firefox or another browser that supports these extensions. FF mobile is one of the best things about android IMO.

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

800 mAh battery 8 hours uptime ... I dont know.... This is something like an oversized prototype smartwatch where engineers simply didn´t had to care for usability, just needed a testbench for SW testing.

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

In many respects I would like to use a device with the size and smartly designed user interface of the n9, (and it's tiny 3.9 inch screen! ) in a similar fashion.

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

Quote:

Originally Posted by Merienth (Post 1549406)

800 mAh battery 8 hours uptime ...

"Uptime" or "talk time"? If the latter, then it is about four times better than my Jolla.

And what is this "NumberShare" thingy they talk about? Something US-specific again?

Re: Palm is back... um, or wtf

Techradar: displays a giant grey page complaining about my use of ad-blockers (uBlock here).
add techradar to NoScript blacklist, website works (minus some photo illustration)

Palm:
a smart device that piggy backs on phone would have been great back in the 00s, back in the PDA era (that's how i used my Palm IIIc, Palm Tunsgtem T3, Tapwave Zodiac, etc. paired over IrDA and later Bluetooth to various Ericsson dumbphones).

But I completely fail to see the use case in 2018.

Probably they are aiming for the latest "fed up with always online smartphones, constant e-mails, bosses treating e-mails like IM, and sorial-network induced FOMO" that has caused the return of modern dumb phone.

Except that they aim for that subset of them that has elicted to completly drop smart phones and only use dumb phones as main daily drivers.

Except that, there in for the very specific sub-subset of the above, that actually needs smart features, but insist on owning a dumbphone only and utterly refuses to have a secondary smartphone.

so basically back to the dumbphone+PDA use cas of two decades ago, except nowadays, the whole market for that has dwindled to about 5 people, all of which are already working in this San Francisco startup that bought up the Palm name.

the only advantage I see is battery life:
- dumbphone
- only occasionally connected PDA
both can be made to last for a week.