PALM PHONE

Fun, endearing, and bad at everything

That's usually the expression I get when I whip out the new Palm phone, one of the tiniest Android phones released in recent memory. This 3.3-inch device has a spec sheet closer to a smartwatch than a smartphone, and it looks more like a prop from a comedy skit rather than a serious connectivity product. There have been phones with 3.3-inch displays in the past, but they haven't really been combined with the more compact design trends of today. The result is something ridiculously, eye-catchingly small. The Palm phone looks like a joke.
Wait, "Palm phone"? That Palm? Yep, this phone, which is called "Palm" and from the company "Palm" (so the Palm Palm?) is a newly formed zombie brand made from the ashes of the legendary Palm Inc, the very same company that created the Palm Pilot, the Palm Treo, and WebOS. After bombing out in the smartphone market circa 2010 and selling to HP, Chinese firm TCL bought the rights to Palm back in 2014 and announced plans to resurrect the company in 2015. The corpse of Palm remained still for several years, but the right combination of a full moon, or lightning strike, or something roused the company back to life just last month. Zombie Palm's first product is this tiny, Verizon-exclusive smartphone with a not-so-tiny price tag of $350.


Design and build quality
Palm definitely did something right with the design of the Palm phone. Before the logic center of the brain kicks in and asks "What am I supposed to use this for?" people's initial impression of the Palm phone is usually amusement. You'll always get a smile, laugh, or eye roll when you show someone the Palm phone for the first time. It's just so cute and tiny and different. You look ridiculous using it in public, and you'll usually get weird looks from people as they no doubt wIt's hard to communicate just how small the phone is from a spec sheet, but here's a little exercise for those of you at home: grab your wallet, pull out a credit card, and hold it as if it were a smartphone. That's about how big the Palm phone is.
Now hold the credit card in both hands, stick both thumbs on the front, and pretend you're typing on a tiny QWERTY keyboard. Are your hands cramping up yet? Having a hard time imagining typing on a keyboard that small? You're now getting a good idea of what to expect.onder, "what the heck is that thing?"
The 3.3-inch display doesn't sound that small on a spec sheet: after all, the first-gen iPhone had a 3.5-inch display, and the first Android phone (the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream) had a 3.2-inch display, so it doesn't sound that outlandish. Those early smartphones only had a 3:2 aspect ratio. So they were much wider than the Palm phone's 16:9 display. So, forget about the screen measurement—you've probably never held a smartphone this skinny.

The 1280x720 display means the Palm phone is packing 445 pixels per inch. The dense, tiny display looks great, although it is only an LCD. The front and back are covered with Gorilla Glass, with an aluminum frame peeking out from between the two glass panels. The glass back is a fingerprint magnet, and, while usually I would complain about how fragile glass backs are, I'm honestly not sure the Palm phone weighs enough to crack the glass panel when dropped.
The front adheres to many of the usual smartphone conventions—you get rounded display corners, a speaker/earpiece combo on top, and an 8MP front-facing camera. For navigation you get the option of displaying the world's tiniest on-screen navigation buttons or using the single capacitive navigation button that sits just below the screen. This one button tries to pull triple-duty and cover the three main navigation features: a single tap will go back, a double tap will open the home screen, and a long press will open recent apps. I never found it to be even close to useable.
The aluminum sides have only a power button, SIM tray, a pair of microphones, and a USB-C port. There's no volume rocker at all. Instead, you have to pull down the Quick Settings panel and adjust the volume slider the same way you would adjust screen brightness. The lack of a volume rocker is pretty annoying—you can't easily adjust the volume of music or a call, and you can't change the volume of a video while still watching the video. It also makes a phone reviewer's life difficult, since you can't take screenshots easily. There's a button in the Quick Settings to take a screenshot, but that simply doesn't work for many screens.

The back has just a single 12MP camera and flash and nothing else. Without a fingerprint reader, you'll have to log in with a PIN, pattern, or password, or you'll have to trust the questionably secure 2D face-unlock powered only by the front-facing camera.Other than the lack of a fingerprint reader and NFC, the Palm phone is a full-featured Android device with all the LTE connectivity, telephony, and app access you would expect from a normal-size smartphone. Oddly though, Verizon won't let you buy the phone and activate it. The company requires the Palm phone to be a secondary device on your Verizon account, where it will share a phone number and SMS access with your primary smartphone. Another oddity: the phone has what is clearly a SIM slot on the side, but it doesn't open.
Speaking of things that are "not good," let's talk performance! The Palm phone struggles to do just about everything, which is expected considering the Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 SoC is near the bottom of Qualcomm's lineup. You get eight Cortex A53 cores and an Adreno 505 GPU, all built on a 28nm manufacturing process. 

While that's not great, the Palm phone still performs worse than the specs and benchmarks would lead you to believe. I ran into all sorts of problems like GFXBench crashing in between benchmarks and Chrome randomly closing.The battery life is awful. The Palm phone easily has the worst battery performance of any phone I've ever tested. It's the worst score we've ever gotten in our battery tests, and during heavy usage, describing the battery percentage as a minute-by-minute countdown timer is not an exaggeration.The battery life is the real killer for this phone. Even if the $350 price doesn't matter to you, the battery life is so poor it makes the phone unfit for any use case. The Palm phone feels like it is always on the brink of death, and that makes it an untrustworthy product to bring with you as your only form of communication or media.Palm's band-aid solution to the terrible battery life is to include a "Life Mode" switch that will turn off Wi-Fi and LTE connectivity when the screen is off, which will certainly improve standby battery life.

Ron Amadeo