Hands On With the New, Tiny Palm Phone

Palm's back, and it's tiny.

The new Palm smartphone—the company and product are just "Palm"—is a teeny little Android phone that's designed to give you a more portable, less distracting alternative to your main Verizon smartphone. It's part of a potential trend of anti-distraction devices that I'm really happy about right now, although its weird sales strategy (you have to also have another Verizon phone) may limit its appeal.

And...it's Palm. While the new Palm, a startup formed by ex-Samsung and FrogDesign execs with money and backing from TCL, has nothing to do with the company that made the PalmPilot and webOS, the brand still has a lot of power for older techies. It stands for ease, simplicity, clarity, and vision. It also stands for relentless strategic stumbles, but it's never been accused of not being brave.

"You have this following, and you have the passion around what the brand originally stood for," new-Palm founder Dennis Miloseski told me. "But you have a generation of people who never experienced Palm. So what we would like to do is look at how the brand can be reinvented in the right way."

A Tiny Extra Phone

First, the phone itself. The Palm, by Palm, is a small Android-powered lozenge with a 3.3-inch, 1,280-by-720 screen. Given the physical size of the screen, that makes for an insanely high 445 pixels per inch. It measures 3.8 by 2.0 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.2 ounces. It's mostly black, with either a silver or gold surround. It costs $349, and it's coming out in November.

That's a lot of specs. The key here is how it feels, and it feels...fun. There's finally a phone that fits in your back pocket, or your coin pocket, again. There's an armband for it, and it's waterproof, so you can take it swimming.

But also, being small, it's less immersive than your standard smartphone. It's less suck-you-in compelling. That's the point.

"Our smartphones have turned into tablets and supercomputers," Miloseski said. "We are no longer striking up conversations in coffee shops. We are no longer connected to the real world. We are entranced with technology."

The UI looks more like the Apple Watch than it does like Android—it's a scrolling array of app icons that you can tap through. Because the screen resolution is decent, the apps format well. There's a standard Android window shade for quick settings, and a full app drawer at the bottom. The touch keyboard is as big as it can be on this small a device, although Palm encourages you to use Google Assistant voice entry.

The body is minimalistic. There's no headphone jack; you're supposed to use wireless headphones. There aren't even any volume buttons, although you can remap the power button to control volume, if using the volume control on the window shade makes you too nervous.

Palm thought through what people actually need their phones for when they're out. Cameras are a big deal, so it's put 12MP main and 8MP front-facing cameras on the device.

Under the hood, the Palm runs Android 8.1 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 with an X9 LTE modem that supports all of Verizon's bands. When we say it's a Verizon exclusive, it's a physical Verizon exclusive—the nano-SIM inside is non-removable, and it's Verizon only.

The device has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. It doesn't have a microSD card slot because you're not watching video or playing fancy games, and 32GB can hold a lot of music. There's no fingerprint sensor, so you'll need to use face unlock. And it's going to lean on LTE, because it's limited to 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, which is often slow and crowded.

The 800mAh battery is a problem, and I think that's a big part of why it's being pitched as a secondary device. It has 3 hours, 20 minutes of talk time, about five and a half hours of LTE music streaming, and about eight hours of typical use with its Life Mode off.

About that Life Mode: Is it a way to get around using a very small battery, an anti-digital distraction feature, or both? Probably both. It disables the phone's radios when the screen is off, although you can make sure certain notifications blow through. That both extends battery life and prevents that bling-bling-bling Pavlovian response we all have.

"What Life Mode alludes to is, for you to value your human relationships and things that are real, and how technology can help support them versus the other way around," Miloseski said.

The phone has a surprisingly powerful speaker for a tiny device, and call quality is excellent.

"I think we are entering a voice-first world," Miloseski said, hopefully.

Palm vs. Palm

A Storied Name

In case you aren't familiar with Palm, it was the definitive brand of the first handheld computing era, in the 1990s. Palm PDAs were the first affordable, usable handhelds, eventually evolving into the Palm Treos, the first mainstream smartphones. The company staggered in the mid-2000s, though, on an old story—it had trouble updating its 1990s-era OS for a more connected world. But it had one more great idea left.

When the Palm Pre smartphone appeared in 2009, it was an absolute revelation. Palm's webOS was worlds more advanced from the Android of its day and, for a hot second, considered to be the true potential competitor to Apple. (It helped that the Palm of the time was largely run by ex-Apple employees.) The Verge's Dieter Bohn, perhaps the world's greatest webOS fan, points out that in 2011, webOS had a gesture interface, wireless charging, card-based multitasking, and a ton of other features it took its competitors five years to adopt.

But Palm was grotesquely mismanaged. It was only able to secure Sprint as a carrier partner, and Palm and Sprint staff never got along. Just as webOS was getting started, the company was sold to HP, which was going through a painful and ridiculous series of CEO changes and dropped the whole project. Eventually, HP sold the brand to TCL, maker of Alcatel and BlackBerry smartphones, in 2014, and TCL has sat on it for the past four years.

Enter new-Palm founders Dennis Miloseski and Howard Nuk, who were shopping their idea for a tiny quasi-smartphone around Silicon Valley and fell into a conversation with TCL, who were looking for something to do with this Palm brand. The ideas meshed, and TCL decided to license the Palm name to the unnamed startup and build their phone.

That's an important point—this isn't a TCL phone, not the way Alcatel phones are TCL phones. And it isn't really a Palm phone in any sense of continuity with Palm of old, although there's a massive Easter egg in the UI for Palm fans. Swipe up from the bottom, and you can go to app shortcuts by scrawling a letter shape in a distinctly Graffiti-like text entry area.

A Less Distracting World?

I've been irritated and overwhelmed by the world for the past year or so, but at the same time I'm addicted to my smartphone. Don't judge me too harshly; I'm like the proverbial fat food critic. But I've been trying to keep an eye out for new devices that let people stay connected, but loosen the noose of continuous notifications a bit.

Republic Wireless' screenless Relay is one: It connects you to your family. Punkt's MP 02 high-end voice phone is another. Now this one is a third. I'm hoping there's a trend here.

My fear is that cost is going to get in the way—that having a less distracting world, weirdly, will become the province of the rich. Both the Punkt and Palm devices cost $349, which is about $200 more than what a lot of the readers asking me for simpler phones want to pay.

It's painfully unintuitive, because you think that simpler and smaller things should cost less. Unfortunately, as Punkt explained to me, there are massive economies of scale involved with big-screen smartphones—it's actually cheaper to make a crappy 5-inch Android slab right now than it is to make a well-designed LTE voice phone.

Palm's persona and marketing continue along this theme. Miloseski and Nuk appear to be massive hipsters, and the marketing is full of young, attractive, well-to-do people taking their Palm phones out for an evening. If the Punkt concept is about a fiftysomething corporate executive being able to go for a picnic with their family without being on Slack, the Palm concept is about twentysomething Brooklyn dwellers doing Active Life Stuff without getting sucked into playing Alphabears.

To appeal to that market, the Palm has to be cool, and I think it is. I mean, I don't know from cool, but this is a tiny, jewel-like thing with a UI that looks like watchOS, and which is going to come with a range of leather cases including a tiny Kate Spade wallet.

Neither Kin Nor Kind

So the Palm phone is a tiny smartphone that you're supposed to use as a secondary phone. Here comes the weirdest part: You can only buy it as a secondary phone. You must already have a primary Verizon line to use it, and it only works with a special SIM card called NumberShare that syncs your number to the device. The phone costs $349, or $17.04 per month, plus $10 per month for service on top of your existing Verizon service line.

This is a fully functioning smartphone, remember. It's not a Bluetooth headset or any kind of real accessory device. The need to have a main phone is more conceptual (and financial?) than technological.

The Palm works much better with an Android phone than with an iPhone, because of iMessage. If you have a primary Android phone, you can sync your same Google account, download all your key apps, and get your texts on the Palm phone. If you use iMessage, you're screwed.

Meeting with Palm and Verizon guys, I joked about how a $650 smartphone plus this thing equals the price of an iPhone XS, which is true. Now Verizon just needs to offer a really good $650 Android smartphone. The carrier has a big gap between the $480 Moto Z3 and the $750 LG G7 in its lineup.

I have a long memory, and Verizon's strategy for the Palm phone reminds me a little too much of another doomed Verizon product, the Microsoft Kin. The Kin was a texting phone that Verizon assassinated by charging it monthly fees like a smartphone.

Verizon assured me that there is absolutely nothing in common between that experience and this one. (Natch.) But what they do have in common is very unintuitive plan pricing. The fact that this can't be sold as a standalone device is so very, very weird that I fear it's going to prevent people from buying it.

We'll be getting the Palm phone in November. Check back then for a full review.

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