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Palm

palm.com

55 pointschrisdroukas50 comments

I feel like the only one who thinks this is kind of awesome. I want a small phone. As small as possible, that can still text and act as an LTE hotspot, with very basic browsing, and Spotify. I want that. The iPhone SE was perfect for me.

This legitimizes the form factor, which is what is attractive, IMO. It’s the modern pocket watch and every pair of pants has had a spot for it since the 19th century. Talk about a stealth wearable entry.

Personally, I’m getting sick of lugging around a oversized slab in my back pocket and as much as I like my watch, I find myself taking it off or leaving it on the charger more than I thought I would. Having something with a slightly larger screen would hit that UX sweet spot and kill two birds with one stone.

And as far as form factors go, the CC size is pretty much universal. Just think of all the places a small screen like that could go.

How about a folding display or larger battery for a hotspot? Seems inevitable. If you’re questioning building one of these things, there’s plenty of supporting evidence that the idea fits the MAYA principle.

>The iPhone SE was perfect for me.

I’ve been stockpiling them until support ends or something actually better comes out. While some additional band support would be nice I don’t find the SE to have any dealbreakers yet.

Phones are my go-to real example of different people expecting mutually exclusive things from the same type of product. You want a phone as small as possible. I want it as large as possible.

I don't understand the need for a large phone. If I need a large screen, I just use my laptop or desktop. Moreover, without a proper keyboard I mostly just read a tad bit of text. You don't need a massive screen for that.

Photos look better on a larger screen. Especially when you want to show them to other people. Say, you meet some friends in a café, and want to show them your vacation photos.

You can fit more text on a larger screen, which makes it better for reading. You can fit more icons, widgets, etc. It's easier to do precise taps.

Basically, I want a phone as large as it's possible without losing ability to operate it with one hand (that's when you get a tablet).

iPhone 4S was about the right size, iPhone 5C had a really good feel. If they could put those two together and maybe tighten the chin and forehead to basically hit the comfortable limit of thumb movement across the screen, I think it'd be spot-on.

How about a smartphone brand that promises to never change the UI again after version 1.0? Users can move their buttons around or change their appearance, but their investment in muscle memory is sacred. Before javascript hit the internet everyone used (and frequently declined to update) native apps, and largely controlled their UI, but as a society we just gave that control to web designers. Many Vim and Emacs users never let go, but it used to be GUI users as well; I remember tech savvy mac using university professors with 1000 icons on their desktop that are all there for a reason. They didn't search; they just reached.

One thing I miss from the pre-touchscreen era: never-changing UI with soft-realtime guarantees. When e.g. using my old K800i, I had memorized sequences of actions and delays (eg: "down, 3, ok, wait ~1 second, down, down, ok"). The delays were consistent. This meant I could operate my phone without looking at it, without even pulling it out of my pocket. This is impossible in the smartphone era, not just because UIs change, but because delays are completely unpredictable.

I love seeing new product ideas, but I'm baffled at how this one made it all the way to production.

Basic premise is.. "Hey, we're going to make our smartphone so undesirable that you won't want to use it except when you absolutely need it. However, we'll make sure it looks well-built so people know that you've made a deliberate lifestyle choice and that this isn't your primary phone."

To be fair it wouldn’t be the first time a lifestyle luxury phone brand took off (see Vertu or Porsche Design). Palm does still have mindshare in the older crowd so that could be leveraged. The issue is the new logo bears no resemblance.

Alternatively, if they keep the price down it can be a viable second phone when traveling light (provided batt life doesn’t suck).

Personally I think their pitch on the site sucks and the product will be a flop since there’s no way in hell they’ll get software and hardware build quality perfect at launch. It might inspire xiaomi or another more experienced Chinese manufacturer to make a better comparable product.

Seriously. Plus you can buy these things on AliExpress for 1/5th the cost. And if you don't want to give up your smart phone completely, you can buy slick looking "bluetooth dialers" on AliExpress for even cheaper.

The general cheap small smartphone on aliexpress are MTK chipset phones running android gingerbread (or some other ancient version). You get what you pay for, unless I’m wrong and you actually have some decent products to link.

Yeah good call on the MTK chipset, looks like that's the case. :(

Or an Apple Watch.

> isn't your primary phone

I'm sure this seems like the only conclusion, if your concept of human being is "those weird animals that spend 100% of their time glued to one or another smartphone". My primary phone is a Nokia 106, and life without Uber, maps, and Spotify on my phone is actually just fine (though I would probably have a smartphone if that was the extent of the deal). It stands by for the better part of a month, and gives me about a day and a half of periodic battery warnings until I think it's time to plug it in.

I don't see any reason why, with today's radio/application chipsets, battery technology, display technology, and sensors, we can't have a reasonably-sized (think iPhone 4S but 5C thick) good quality smartphone which holds a charge for more than just a couple days and can run WhatsApp.

Yay a small phone. Oh it's tied to only Verizon, and costs 350 dollars...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/palm-rises-from-the-...

Yeah, I misread it originally as $34.99, which may make some sense as a kitschy novelty thing, even if only marginally.

What an irritating webpage. Just a bunch of pretentious photos with text that loads way too late.

It's actually a zero-content WWW site if one has not turned on Javascript. Aside from the script and <meta>, it comprises just a <title> and some empty <div>s and appears as entirely blank.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225645

It's a zero-content WWW even with JavaScript enabled. Just load of lifestyle marketing crap, and you have to dig in a bit to get an actual product description.

This thing has to have a massively crappy battery life (in the real, real world)...

Seriously, 800mah?

The only reason that smartphones "work" is because they have big screens, while big screens obviously consume a lot of power and therefore require big batteries, there's more space for the battery inside as the PCB doesn't need to be big like the screen.

OMG, you can almost hear the giant props of the B-52 required to drop this bomb. As other commenters have pointed out, it can't decide if it wants to be an iPhone SE or an Apple Watch. It could succeed, but it is going to have to be cheeaaaap. Which it won't be, 'cuz you know, lifestyle.

This is a device with a unique approach to mobile user experience, but there are literally no photos of the UI on the site.

Maybe the idea is that it feels like a phone, so you pull it from your pocket thanks to extreme smartphone muscle memory. You find your hands have selected a black glass slab that says "PA LM" in the middle, which is quite uninteresting, So you put it away. Distraction crisis averted.

(Kidding obviously, but nothing on the site says otherwise! Honestly I wrote my first mobile app for the Palm V and I would love for this to be a killer rebirth of the Palm brand. Guess we'll have to wait and see though!)

Not sure if this is what you're referring to but there's pictures of the UI on the product page: https://www.palm.com/product

And it turns out it's just a small Android phone. There's no unique approach to any kind of experience.

Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm,_Inc., maker of the Palm Pilot. :(

FYI: https://www.palm.com/about

They reference/sort of say they are the original Palm.

Also, you don’t need another phone line/connection. It will use your same phone number. I’m sure Verizon will figure out a way to charge for it but it looks like it won’t be a whole new line.

We’ll see I guess.

I was deeply disappointed to see this is not a return of the original Palm, in kind of perhaps a return to a ‘non-internet’ ‘traditional’ PDA or something.

Or...I don’t know. Anything remotely interesting. And yeah, someone else mentioned the payload of the header of the site, it’s no wonder it behaves so poorly on my iPhone SE.

If this does have anything to do with the makers of the original Palm, that’s a damn shame.

P.S. WebOS was freaking awesome. Even if it never had good hardware to back it up.

It seems this device works even when it's nowhere near your "full" phone. Too bad it'll basically require a second data plan.

To be fair, so do the untethered watches.

Yes buy a second phone. What better way to be more present in your daily life?

That website is something else. This is only the JavaScript payload fetched when you visit. (A favorite is the 2 versions of the "lodash" library):

  cdn.trackjs.com/releases/current/tracker.js
  connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js
  ding.wix.com/asdk/dispatcher.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/js-sdk/1.96.0/js/wix-private.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/promote-analytics-adapter/2.62.0/analytics-event-adapter.bundle.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/app/main-r.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/components/components.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/core/core.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/coreUtils/coreUtils.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/dataFixer/dataFixer.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/first-load/first-load.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/layout/layout.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/linkBar/linkBar.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/mediaContainer/mediaContainer.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/platformInit/platformInit.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/santaProps/santaProps.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/skins/skins.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/stripColumnsContainer/stripColumnsContainer.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/tpa/tpa.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/utils/utils.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/viewerCompsService/viewerCompsService.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/warmup/warmup.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/warmupUtils/warmupUtils.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/santa/1.5140.9/packages-bin/wixCode/wixCode.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/services/third-party/requirejs/2.1.15/require.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/@shimil/remote-dom@5.0.6/dist/local.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/data-capsule@1.0.83/dist/statics/frame-listener.bundle.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/fedops-logger@3.0.10/dist/statics/fedops-logger-module.bundle.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/focus-visible@4.1.1/dist/focus-visible.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/gsap@1.19.0/src/minified/plugins/ScrollToPlugin.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/gsap@1.19.0/src/minified/TweenMax.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/hls.js@0.8.9/dist/hls.light.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/image-client-api@1.1151.0/dist/imageClientApi.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/lodash@4.17.10/lodash.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/lodash@4.17.11/lodash.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/mobx-react@4.2.2/index.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/mousetrap@1.4.6/mousetrap.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/pm-rpc@1.0.11/build/pm-rpc.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/react-dom-factories@1.0.2/index.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/react-dom@16.3.3/umd/react-dom.production.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/react@16.4.2/umd/react.production.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-bundle@1.273.0/dist/bundle.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-components@1.572.0/dist/santa-components.prod.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-core-utils@1.914.0/dist/coreUtils.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-core-utils@1.914.0/dist/warmupUtils.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-data-fixer@1.249.0/dist/santa-data-fixer.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-external-modules@1.66.0/color-convert/0.2.0/color.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-host-platform-services@1.77.0/dist/host-platform-api.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-host-platform-services@1.77.0/dist/host-worker-init.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-mobile-core@1.550.0/dist/mobileLayoutUtils.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-multilingual@1.398.0/dist/languages.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-platform-utils@1.568.0/dist/platformUtils-bundle.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-renderer@1.169.0/dist/santa-renderer.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/santa-skin-utils@1.379.0/dist/skin-utils.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/wix-ui-santa@1.0.537/dist/statics/compsToPackages.bundle.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/wix-ui-santa@1.0.537/dist/statics/dataRefs.bundle.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/wix-ui-santa@1.0.537/dist/statics/viewerComponentService.bundle.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/xss@0.2.12/dist/xss.min.js
  static.parastorage.com/unpkg/zepto@1.2.0/dist/zepto.min.js
  www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js
  www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js

This doesn't include the CSS, images, fonts, video, etc.

Remarkable.

Part of that seem's to be Wix's React components (https://github.com/wix/wix-ui#readme) which means they didn't even build it themselves

That explains why I see nothing when JS is disabled.

How many of these zombie branded products are there? Remember the vaporware Commodore PET phone?

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/commodore-smartphone/

https://pocketnow.com/commodore-smartphone-vaporware

And how many bonafide spiritual successor products exist? The Gemini PDA springs to mind.

I wonder how much they paid to acquire that Instagram @palm account (unless someone who works for them registered it early... Let alone the palm.com domain)

Does anyone here know the legality of selling an Instagram handle that is also the name of a company? I have a 4 letter (with the same repeating vowel) Instagram account from 2010. There are multiple companies that have that name in different fields. Can I approach those companies to see if they want to buy my account or will they sue me to oblivion ?

It’s alwyas been a personal account and is my nickname since I was a child.

On a side note, someone has tried to reset my account dozens of times throughout the years.

>Does anyone here know the legality of selling an Instagram handle that is also the name of a company?

My guess would be it would depend on what the original use was. If you had a brand in a different sector and offered it I’m sure they could complain but they likely wouldn’t win. (see nissan.com)

The idea was chased by the original palm with a phone called Veer. After the HP acquisition of Palm it was released as HP Veer and I really really liked the Pre and Veer. Too bad that stupid Leo Apotheker killed of the Phones before they even had a chance.

We've been here before with Palm; is there a reason we should try again or are they going to pull these devices from the market after a few weeks of selling them?

P.S. If it's cheap it's going to break a lot... you know palm the cheaper it is the worse it is

3.3" display. Hmmm a bit smaller than iPhone 4?

Being used to big phones like those Galaxy Note series (yes I use them a lot for taking notes and reading ebooks), I guess this won't be my main phone.

And too bad it's locked to Verizon, yes? I live in Southeast Asia...

This is likely going to go the way of the Essential phones

Palm Pre was easily thr best phone i ever used

This.. Not so much

Why not just buy a second smartphone?

Isn't this just an iPhone SE?

I think you meant to say "Apple Watch".

It’s trying to be a phone companion, like a smart watch but in your pocket. Phones are getting bigger and bigger so this is a way to get a second screen experience without constraining that experience to a 1” screen on your wrist.

I think that’s what they are trying to do. It instantly reminds me of the memory cards of the Dreamcast.

I am bullish!

A phone with... a piece of string!

In all seriousness though, a reasonably-sized smartphone is a good idea, hopefully they don't ruin it somehow.

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