The Palm is a smartphone with a 3.3 inch, 720p display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a $350 price tag.

It’s the first Palm-branded smartphone to be announced since 2010, but this isn’t the same Palm that brought us PalmOS and webOS.

The new Palm smartphone runs Google Android 8.1 software with a custom user interface and it comes from a California-based startup that now owns the rights to the Palm name.

First unveiled earlier this month, Verizon has announced you’ll be able to buy the new phone starting November 2nd.

As expected, the new phone is a Verizon exclusive, and it will sell for $350 if you buy it outright. You can also save $50 and get one for $300 if you sign up for a 2-year plan with Verizon or you can pay full price but spread out your payments in 24 installments of $14.58 each.

The phone will be available in two colors: “Titanium” or “Gold” and Verizon is also introducing a line of accessories including cases, sleeves, and wrist straps — something that makes sense when you’re talking about a phone this small, I guess.

The Palm measures just 3.8″ x 2″, making the phone about the size of a credit card.

One thing that’s tough to fit in a phone that small? A big battery. So it’s unsurprising that the Palm doesn’t have one: the phone has an 800 mAh battery and the company that makes it only promises up to 8 hours of battery life.

This is a smartphone designed for people who don’t actually want to use a smartphone very much.

Other features include a 12MP rear camera and 8MP front-facing camera and it’s rater IP68 for protection against dust and water. The phone supports 4G LTE, GPS, Bluetooth 4.2 and 802.11b/g/n WiFi.

 

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9 replies on “Palm’s new phone goes on sale next week (Verizon only)”

  1. I’m not sure if I’d call this thing a phone — it needs to be paired with a phone to make calls.

  2. cheap ok.
    but why not open bootloader for fos, tizen, jolly or normal fedora/ubuntu?

  3. This device sounds like the answer to a question nobody asked. I give them credit for trying something different, but I don’t think this is the right path.

    1. I think there is a legitimate market for people who want a moderately specced small smartphone, but the smartphone companion route was probably ill advised. While waiting for the Mate SE to manifest instead of the watered down US Honor 7x, I used my original Moto G loaded with Android 8.1 and the experience wasn’t too bad. I mean, it was nice having a pocket able device with a small but crisp 720p screen. There are a handful of mini phones with more horsepower, but none of them that are likely to be updated after purchase.

      I guess what I’m trying to say is that there must me a niche of people like me, however small, who aren’t ever far from their laptops and workstations where a minuscule smartphone with an ideally long battery life would suit us just fine.

      1. Yeah my take away from the press release is that this is only intended as a “companion” device to a (larger) smartphone. Though I suppose it could be used as a stand-alone device, right? Begs the question: will it still function if not paired to another smartphone?

  4. “the phone has an 800 mAh battery and the company that makes it only promises up to 8 hours of battery life.”

    That stat alone makes this thing a lousy, lousy successor to the Palm name. I never liked Palm devices as much as Windows CE back in the PDA days, but Palm PDAs had about five times the battery life thanks to their monochrome displays.

    Palm would be a great brand name for a new E-Ink smartphone – one that you’d only have to charge every few days.

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