Palm Phone - Review 2022 - Brennan Weared

We probably demand to become off of our phones. I know I exercise, and I tin't; I however want to be able to accept photos and call a Lyft. (Re)enter Palm, a storied mobile name that'due south been resurrected by a California startup backed by large Chinese telephone maker TCL. New-Palm's first telephone, a $349 product only called Palm, but which we're going to call the Palm phone, is supposed to be a secondary telephone that gives you just enough connectivity that you lot can leave your chief phone at home.

Palm's idea of a tiny, fashionable phone that does everything you actually need, but is lousy at scrolling through time-sucking apps like Facebook, is a good i. Unfortunately, it looks like Palm rushed its phone to market place to make the 2022 holiday flavour, and the phone needs several major software updates earlier nosotros can recommend information technology.

Pricing

The Palm telephone is existence sold in a really weird way. Palm seems to exist acknowledging that it isn't good enough to be your only telephone, so it's a $349 buy and a $10 per month add-on to an existing Verizon account. The phone doesn't accept a removable SIM card—it'south locked to Verizon and must be set up upwards cloning the number of another Verizon telephone. Verizon sent u.s. our Palm forth with a Pixel three XL as if to show us how you lot can have a really large phone and a really small phone, and use each one when appropriate.

A Beautiful Object

The best thing well-nigh the Palm phone is the object itself. I honey how I tin genuinely lose it in my jacket pocket; I forget I have a phone on me, until I consciously retrieve near having a phone on me, and and so I vaguely retrieve, oh yep, there information technology is, somewhere. It's non 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 actually does. At 3.viii by 2.0 past 0.iii inches (HWD) and a mere 2.2 ounces, information technology's a delightful fidget object you can plow over and over in your hand, smoothen all effectually with just the hint of a lip where the silver plastic environs encounters the glass front and back. I guess you could fifty-fifty skip it along a lake, as it's IP68 waterproof.

It's very minimalistic. The only button is a ability button; the only port is USB-C. Y'all'll demand Bluetooth or USB-C headphones. I recommend Bluetooth, considering a software issues makes the system throw a weird message about "charging this accompaniment" when you lot plug in USB-C headphones. Too, I recommend headphones with a physical volume control on them, because there's no book button; you can swipe down on the screen for a volume slider, merely you demand to unlock the telephone to exercise that.

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

2 Phones, Ane Number, No iPhones

The Palm doesn't have its own number; it shares a number with your primary Verizon line. Here'south how the number-duplicating thing works: If someone tries to phone call yous 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. Choice up the call on ane, and the other will "hang upwardly." Outgoing calls from either phone appear to come from your number.

If you want messages to sync betwixt the phones, you lot demand to use Verizon's Messaging+ app for texting, or an Android-compatible, multi-device-friendly app like Facebook Messenger or GroupMe. You tin can't use any app like Whatsapp or WeChat that but allows you to log in on one phone at a time, considering as soon equally you set information technology upward on the Palm phone, your app on your primary telephone volition deregister. You can utilize Uber, because that app allows multiple logins from phones with the same number.

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

If you lot're looking for a running companion that plays music and tracks you via GPS, the Palm phone is slap-up. But the lack of primal messaging apps actually amercement its condition every bit a "going-out telephone." I of the big advantages of a Palm versus an unconnected handheld/clothing, 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 telephone has a big trouble.

A Unique Interface

The Palm phone tin can employ a Pin or facial recognition to unlock, every bit 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 eight.i Oreo abode screen in a manner that makes sense on a tiny phone. Instead of widgets or an app drawer, you get an Apple Watch-similar 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 bulletin or opening an incognito browser window. Fonts are thoughtfully chosen; I had no problem reading web pages. In a nod to Palm'due south old Graffiti handwriting-recognition software, if you swipe upwardly and scribble a letter into a box on the screen, it will evidence yous suggested actions and apps starting with that letter. Double-pressing the power button launches Google Banana.

The keyboard isn't as well idea through. It's a third-party keyboard called Fleksy, and I don't similar information technology much. It doesn't support swiping, so you accept to tap pretty precisely on extremely minor impact targets. Some words announced surrounded by little grayness boxes, which is a Fleksy symbol to show that word tin can be turned into a sticker or emoji, and which looks weird. The vocalization-typing button should probably be much more prominent than it is—on a device this small, I'd actually rather dictate than attempt to type.

Disconnecting, a Little More Than You Desire To

The Palm phone has networking problems—LTE, Wi-Fi, vocalism quality, yous name it. Only shouldn't that exist a plus rather than a minus here? Aren't you bringing this phone out considering you want to be poorly connected? Ultimately, though, we base our reviews on things that piece of 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 three Twoscore had none of those problems. Calls connected; they only didn't come through consistently and clearly. I suspect some of the dropouts involved the system dealing with air current noise from the tiny phone's mic, which is unusually far from your mouth. Earpiece book is surprisingly good, though, and the super-tinny trivial speaker, while trebly every bit all heck, has some real oomph to it.

Related Story See How We Exam Phones

Dealing with Wi-Fi was a constant frustration in testing. The phone only supports 2.4GHz 802.11n connections, and even on those, information technology isn't the greatest. I of our part networks dropped repeatedly in weaker-signal atmospheric condition where the Pixel had no trouble property onto Wi-Fi. On our faster test network, speeds were nearly half of what they were on the Pixel. That goes for LTE, equally 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. Just when my previous network had been a weak connexion, I would get a "select a network" screen popping up when the telephone 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 organisation to a halt and having to exist force-quit. The phone besides oftentimes felt hot in normal usage, or even with the screen off (and Life Manner 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, it but feels like the software was rushed to market here.

Palm says the phone has less than a mean solar day'southward worth of battery life, maybe a 24-hour interval if you kill the radios using Life Style, which is one reason yous shouldn't use information technology as your primary phone. It charges over USB-C, not wirelessly.

A Somewhat Dim Picture

The Palm has a 12-megapixel photographic camera on the back and an eight-megapixel camera on the front. Information technology records upwards to 1080p video. The cameras aren't great. Palm's story seems to involve lots of apply when you're running downwards the streets at nighttime or out at the club, and of course low-low-cal operation is the bane of any smartphone photographic camera. Information technology's the bane of this i, too. In our low-light exam, the Palm phone initially wouldn't focus, but fifty-fifty 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 telephone on the right.)

Pixel vs Palm Comparison Shot 1

In full general, this is a smaller sensor than y'all'll notice in a bigger telephone, and so of course yous can tell the deviation. Fifty-fifty in well-lit shots of objects at a distance, zoom in and everything looks a little smeared compared with a peak-of-the-line phone. The odder divergence, in well-lit shots, is that the Palm's colors are just, well, fashion off. I mean, look at the image below. Those colors are off.

Pixel vs Palm Compare 3

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

Pixel vs Palm Face Comparison

Lose This Phone

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

But information technology fails to function well. I can forgive a low-cost telephone for not having a Pixel-quality photographic camera. The Pixel 3 costs $800. But the Whatsapp and iMessage issues, the weak Wi-Fi, the scratchy telephone call quality, the tiny keyboard, and the lack of volume buttons all add together upwards 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 listing of products that had to come out in November, whether or not they were prepare.

The only existent contest I can think of for the Palm are the tiny Android phones coming from Unihertz, like last year'due south Jelly Pro and the upcoming Atom, which we'll exist reviewing presently. Those work on AT&T'southward and T-Mobile's networks, not Verizon's, and have much bigger batteries, but low-res screens that create problem for many tertiary-party apps. I didn't honey the Jelly Pro'due south cameras, either.

Otherwise, no other manufacturer is trying to release you from being swallowed into your screen, while notwithstanding giving you access to the messaging apps you use to suit a nighttime out. The best I tin suggest is that yous utilize attention-direction apps on your main phone to establish some boundaries. I can't recommend the Palm phone for now, though I actually hope the company continues to pursue this thought.