Palm Phone

We probably need to get off of our phones. I know I do, and I can’t; I still want to be able to take photos and call a Lyft. (Re)enter Palm, a storied mobile name that’s been resurrected by a California startup backed by big Chinese phone maker TCL. New-Palm’s first phone, a $ 349 product just called Palm, but which we’re going to call the Palm phone, is supposed to be a secondary phone that gives you just enough connectivity that you can leave your main phone at home.

Palm’s idea of a tiny, stylish phone that does everything you actually need, but is lousy at scrolling through time-sucking apps like Facebook, is a good one. Unfortunately, it looks like Palm rushed its phone to market to make the 2018 holiday season, and the phone needs several major software updates before we can recommend it.

Pricing

The Palm phone is being sold in a really weird way. Palm seems to be acknowledging that it isn’t good enough to be your only phone, so it’s a $ 349 purchase and a $ 10 per month add-on to an existing Verizon account. The phone doesn’t have a removable SIM card—it’s locked to Verizon and must be set up cloning the number of another Verizon phone. Verizon sent us our Palm along with a Pixel 3 XL as if to show us how you can have a really big phone and a really small phone, and use each one when appropriate.

A Beautiful Object

The best thing about the Palm phone is the object itself. I love how I can genuinely lose it in my jacket pocket; I forget I have a phone on me, until I consciously think about having a phone on me, and then I vaguely remember, oh yeah, there it is, somewhere. It’s not quite small enough for the coin pocket on my Levi’s 505 jeans. Palm is going to provide a range of sleeves, cases, and little purses for the device.

Years ago, Samsung told me smartphones should feel like “river stones,” and this one really does. At 3.8 by 2.0 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and a mere 2.2 ounces, it’s a delightful fidget object you can turn over and over in your hand, smooth all around with just the hint of a lip where the silver plastic surround encounters the glass front and back. I guess you could even skip it along a lake, as it’s IP68 waterproof.

It’s very minimalistic. The only button is a power button; the only port is USB-C. You’ll need Bluetooth or USB-C headphones. I recommend Bluetooth, because a software bug makes the system throw a weird message about “charging this accessory” when you plug in USB-C headphones. Also, I recommend headphones with a physical volume control on them, because there’s no volume button; you can swipe down on the screen for a volume slider, but you need to unlock the phone to do that.

The 3.3-inch, 445ppi, 720p screen is bright and lovely. It uses relatively big fonts, because you have to be able to read them, but the key point here is that by being a standard modern Android resolution (and not, say, 480p) it’s compatible with all the Android apps I tried. Now, some of those apps have ridiculously tiny interface elements, to the point where I started wondering if I needed a stylus, but they all work.

Two Phones, One Number, No iPhones

The Palm doesn’t have its own number; it shares a number with your main Verizon line. Here’s how the number-duplicating thing works: If someone tries to call you and your Palm phone isn’t in Life Mode, a special mode that turns off LTE and Wi-Fi when the screen is off, both of your phones will ring. Pick up the call on one, and the other will “hang up.” Outgoing calls from either phone appear to come from your number.

If you want messages to sync between the phones, you need to use Verizon’s Messaging+ app for texting, or an Android-compatible, multi-device-friendly app like Facebook Messenger or GroupMe. You can’t use any app like Whatsapp or WeChat that only allows you to log in on one phone at a time, because as soon as you set it up on the Palm phone, your app on your primary phone will deregister. You can use Uber, because that app allows multiple logins from phones with the same number.

So the Palm phone is not for WhatsApp or WeChat users. It also isn’t for iPhone users. Palm will argue otherwise, because the fashionistas it’s targeting often use iPhones. But anyone who uses iMessage won’t be able to get messages on the Palm phone, and every iPhone user in the US uses iMessage. It’s a core, critical feature of iPhones. There’s also just an inherent kludge in mixing iOS and Android in your life: You get used to the way Siri works, not Google Assistant, and you don’t want to have to re-buy apps on the other platform.

If you’re looking for a running companion that plays music and tracks you via GPS, the Palm phone is great. But the lack of key messaging apps really damages its status as a “going-out phone.” One of the big advantages of a Palm versus an unconnected handheld/wearable, or versus a simple phone like the Punkt MP02, would be the ability to tap into your social circles. If it can’t, then this small phone has a big problem.

A Unique Interface

The Palm phone can use a PIN or facial recognition to unlock, as it doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor. The face recognition doesn’t use fancy 3D imaging like an iPhone, it just uses the front-facing camera.

Palm gets big points for reinventing the Android 8.1 Oreo home screen in a way that makes sense on a tiny phone. Instead of widgets or an app drawer, you get an Apple Watch-like cascade of app icons that scroll smoothly under your finger. Long-press on one, and you get a set of related actions, like starting a new message or opening an incognito browser window. Fonts are thoughtfully chosen; I had no trouble reading web pages. In a nod to Palm’s old Graffiti handwriting-recognition software, if you swipe up and scribble a letter into a box on the screen, it will show you suggested actions and apps starting with that letter. Double-pressing the power button launches Google Assistant.

The keyboard isn’t as well thought through. It’s a third-party keyboard called Fleksy, and I don’t like it much. It doesn’t support swiping, so you have to tap pretty precisely on extremely small touch targets. Some words appear surrounded by little gray boxes, which is a Fleksy symbol to show that word can be turned into a sticker or emoji, and which looks weird. The voice-typing button should probably be much more prominent than it is—on a device this small, I’d really rather dictate than try to type.

Disconnecting, a Little More Than You Want To

The Palm phone has networking problems—LTE, Wi-Fi, voice quality, you name it. But shouldn’t that be a plus rather than a minus here? Aren’t you bringing this phone out because you want to be poorly connected? Ultimately, though, we base our reviews on things that work, and the Palm phone, right now, doesn’t work very well.

On voice calls, I got wobble, dropouts, and scratchy sibilance on a rooftop where the Pixel 3 XL had none of those problems. Calls connected; they just didn’t come through consistently and clearly. I suspect some of the dropouts involved the system dealing with wind noise from the tiny phone’s mic, which is unusually far from your mouth. Earpiece volume is surprisingly good, though, and the super-tinny little speaker, while trebly as all heck, has some real oomph to it.

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Dealing with Wi-Fi was a constant frustration in testing. The phone only supports 2.4GHz 802.11n connections, and even on those, it isn’t the greatest. One of our office networks dropped repeatedly in weaker-signal conditions where the Pixel had no trouble holding onto Wi-Fi. On our faster test network, speeds were about half of what they were on the Pixel. That goes for LTE, as well.

More than that, though, Life Mode (which disconnects networking while the screen is off, and extends battery life) interacts poorly with weak Wi-Fi connections. At best, Wi-Fi takes several seconds to reattach when you turn the screen back on. But when my previous network had been a weak connection, I would get a “select a network” screen popping up when the phone woke up, even when there were known networks in range.

The Palm is based on a 1.4GHz Snapdragon 435 processor, which benchmarks like other midrange phones. It feels pretty janky, though, with Google Play not rendering a page and quitting, or Chrome dragging the system to a halt and having to be force-quit. The phone also frequently felt hot in normal usage, or even with the screen off (and Life Mode turned off), showing that it was churning a little too much in the background. Those things shouldn’t be happening on a phone with a low-power processor, 32GB of onboard storage, and 3GB of RAM. As I said early on, it just feels like the software was rushed to market here.

Palm says the phone has less than a day’s worth of battery life, maybe a day if you kill the radios using Life Mode, which is one reason you shouldn’t use it as your primary phone. It charges over USB-C, not wirelessly.

A Somewhat Dim Picture

The Palm has a 12-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel camera on the front. It records up to 1080p video. The cameras aren’t great. Palm’s story seems to involve lots of use when you’re running down the streets at night or out at the club, and of course low-light performance is the bane of any smartphone camera. It’s the bane of this one, too. In our low-light test, the Palm phone initially wouldn’t focus, but even after it focused, the image it took was dim and indistinct compared with the Pixel 3. (Each of the images below were taken by the Pixel 3 on the left and the Palm phone on the right.)

In general, this is a smaller sensor than you’ll find in a bigger phone, and so of course you can tell the difference. Even in well-lit shots of objects at a distance, zoom in and everything looks a little smeared compared with a top-of-the-line phone. The odder difference, in well-lit shots, is that the Palm’s colors are just, well, way off. I mean, look at the image below. Those colors are off.

The front-facing camera performs facial smoothing without a filter, because it just isn’t very sharp. Low-light, front-facing photos are noisy. But even in good light, selfies lack the hyper-realistic precision we’re getting nowadays on flagship smartphones. This isn’t a flagship smartphone, of course, and if you compare the shots with, say, a $ 249 Moto G6, the Palm phone does just fine.

Lose This Phone

The idea of having two phones isn’t insane. You might already have a work phone and a play phone, for instance. I’ve seen that as far back as Nokia’s fashion-phone line from 2005. I personally wouldn’t mind a tiny weekend phone. I’m the guy who’s been asking for smaller smartphones for years now. The Palm phone, beautifully designed and tiny, should be the phone of my dreams.

But it fails to function well. I can forgive a low-cost phone for not having a Pixel-quality camera. The Pixel 3 costs $ 800. But the Whatsapp and iMessage problems, the weak Wi-Fi, the scratchy call quality, the tiny keyboard, and the lack of volume buttons all add up to a phone that’s irritating, not relaxing, to use. Many of these annoyances are probably fixable with software updates, which just puts the Palm phone on the list of products that had to come out in November, whether or not they were ready.

The only real competition I can think of for the Palm are the tiny Android phones coming from Unihertz, like last year’s Jelly Pro and the upcoming Atom, which we’ll be reviewing soon. Those work on AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s networks, not Verizon’s, and have much bigger batteries, but low-res screens that create trouble for many third-party apps. I didn’t love the Jelly Pro’s cameras, either.

Otherwise, no other manufacturer is trying to release you from being swallowed into your screen, while still giving you access to the messaging apps you use to arrange a night out. The best I can suggest is that you use attention-management apps on your main phone to establish some boundaries. I can’t recommend the Palm phone for now, though I really hope the company continues to pursue this idea.

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