Palm Pixi
September 9th, 2009, 5:53pm by Jake
Is this the Palm phone that will finally break through with the masses? Engadget has a nice preview, but they completely miss the most important spec. The weight. Only 3.5 ounces compared to 4.7 ounces for the Pre and iPhone, this might be the lightest smartphone and the smartest lightphone ever. By comparison, even the Centro is 4.2 ounces. Rumored price is $99, but Sprint might push the pricing to $49 to really grab people & require the $70/month plan.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I like the form factor more than the Pre, but it doesn’t have wifi, right? Until Palm gets some apps (soon), I think they’re still gonna have an uphill battle against a $99 iPhone 3G.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I like the form factor more than the Pre, but it doesn’t have wifi, right? Until Palm gets some apps (soon), I think they’re still gonna have an uphill battle against a $99 iPhone 3G.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Looks incredibly sleek, but no WiFi is terrible. Such a blatant attempt to artificially differentiate it from the higher end Pre, but it’s going to hurt Pixi sales so much more than it helps Pre sales. If you haven’t noticed, Palm, Apple manages to include hi end features like WiFi in their entry level phone. And the Sprint exclusive is a terrible idea from a business standpoint.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Well, I think it may be aimed at an entirely different market– they are really going after feature phone users. Personally, I think the no WiFi has more to do with cost & space constraints… the phone is tiny.
The apps are coming, there’s no doubt about that. There are over 200 apps in the PreCentral Homebrew forum, and the paid apps will hit Palm this month. I think they’ll have well over a thousand by the end of the year. I doubt it will be long before there’s at least one Pre app for every category represented on the iPhone, with the notable exception of the iPhone’s outstanding games catalog.
September 10th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I also don’t understand the timing of the announcement — did they not learn anything last time? It’s sad that of the two major tech events of the day (which, in my opinion, were both pretty boring), there’s been a ton more coverage of Apple updating a music player than Palm releasing a new phone.
The phone has been basically leaked for months and months. Why did they announce it yesterday? There was absolutely no need, and they must have known that it would be overshadowed by Apple.
I don’t think that either announcement was a bona fide tech “event,” but if I were Palm, and I didn’t have a blockbuster release on my hands, I’d aim for one of the 363 or so other days of the year.
September 10th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I find it baffling that Palm pre-announced the Pixi at all. Announce it when it goes on sale! Otherwise, it just takes the spotlight off the product that is actually for sale.
The skeptic in me says that they needed to cut the price of the Pre to juice sales, and it would have looked bad if they had done that absent the Pixi announcement. Now they can spin it as though they re-priced the Pre relative to the far cheaper phone in the horizon.
September 10th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Yeah, releasing the Pre just before iPhone 3G S made sense, since they competed directly and the wave would be huge. In comparison, both events yesterday were blips, with no wave from Apple’s announcement and no direct competition even.
But the really big announcement was the Leica M9– the digital camera that Derrick’s been waiting for!
September 15th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Wonder if the Pixi will still go into landscape mode? Seems a little awkward with the always exposed keyboard, and with little maginal benefit (400 instead of 360 px). The gesture area on the Pre also turns into a pg up/ pg dn control in landscape, but that seems also awkward with the keyboard in the way.
October 26th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
15 November release on Sprint, $100 price point on contract (after $150 worth of mail-in rebates, ugh). Engadget, BGR, and Gizmodo all think the price is about $50 too high, since for only $50 more, you can get the Pre.
Engadget had another good point:
October 26th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Pixi at $99 is simply too much, but if they had put wifi in it, I’d probably rather have it than the Pre, just as a matter of form factor preference.
Verizon’s Android push is going to make things really interesting over the next few months.
October 26th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Might be supply issues at launch, they might not be able to make enough to support a lower price at launch.
What Palm really needs to do is to get the Pixi onto AT&T and Verizon by the end of January at $50 or less. They’d be better off doing that today, but it’s not to be.