New Palm Pixi: webOS candybar smartphone

Palm has announced its son-of-Pre: the Pixi. It's a webOS candybar form-factor smartphone for the Centro set. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers give it a mixed reception (geddit?).

By Richi Jennings. September 9, 2009.
(NASDAQ:PALM) (NYSE:S) (NASDAQ:QCOM)

Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention tales of Andy Hertzfeld...

Ginny Mies spies a new smartphone:

Palm unveiled the newest addition to the webOS family, the Pixi, [Tuesday]. ... The Pixi will join its older sibling, the Pre, on the Sprint Network. ... Along with the Pixi's announcement, Sprint.com quietly dropped the Pre's price to $150 .... after they dropped the Pre's price to $100 briefly on Tuesday--only to later redact it.
...
The Pixi is by no means a better phone than the Pre. It is missing two crucial components: GPS and Wi-Fi. The lack of these two features indicates that the Pixi is aimed at a tweener set who probably won't use these features as much as older, more business-minded users.

Joshua Topolsky has video:

We first broke specs and images of the phone -- codenamed Eos and the alternately-spelled "Pixie" -- back in April, when we nabbed what appeared to be a leak of a new, Centro-esque phone headed to AT&T. Today, Palm has announced that the Pixi -- a tiny, sleek webOS-based handset -- will be coming to Sprint this holiday season.
...
The phone is really quite handsome. In terms of industrial design, the clean lines and smart choices in materials belie the Pixi's likely price-point. In your hands it feels solid, though it's shocking just how tiny it is. ... The phone feels really well put together. ... But the thickness is where it really struts its stuff. ... The Pixi is just 0.43-inches thick. To put that in perspective, the iPhone 3GS is 0.48-inches.

Palm's Jon Zilber blogs the party line:

All the power of Palm webOS -- including multitasking activity cards, Palm Synergy, intuitive notifications, and universal search -- will soon be available in a striking new form factor ... in time for the holidays ... Palm’s thinnest phone ever. ... Palm Pixi is especially handy for extensive messaging and social networking.

Jason Chen dreams of product management:

The Palm Pixi is just what you'd get when you ask your engineers to take the Pre, keep as much stuff as possible, but make it smaller. ... The Pixi is slightly lighter than the Pre, losing a lot of weight from not having to slide itself out to reveal a keyboard. ... Each key is more raised because there's no sliding lid to maintain clearance of. So even though the keys are slightly different and smaller, I was able to thumb out words faster and with fewer errors than before.
...
What you'd miss the most is the 80 pixels they had to shave off because of the smaller display. At 2.63 inches, all the Pixi can handle is a 320x400 resolution. This translates into more work for developers, who need to somehow manage two different resolution sizes as well hardware different specs if you want your app to run on both phones. Oh, and there's a 2-megapixel camera as opposed to the Pre's 3-megapixel camera.

Peter To looks to the new stuff:

It looks like Palm's been hard at work not only with getting a new device out the door, but adding some much needed software additions and tweaks as well. Palm has added LinkedIn and Yahoo to your synergy contacts, Yahoo to the messeging application, and rouding it out with an official Facebook application.
...
It loses the shiny metal click button at the bottom right below the gesture area, WiFi and gets a slower processor (a Qualcomm MSM7627 as opposed to the pre's TI OMAP 3). It still does not have a microSD card slot, but keeps the 8 GB internal storage. ... Those expecting this to be that first GSM webOS device, you'll need to wait a wee bit longer..

Tim Conneally is nearly sold: [You're fired -Ed.]

Really, it looks like a WebOS Centro, and as we all now know, the $99 Centro was a quiet smash hit for Palm. Unfortunately its margins were so low that its huge sales --well over a million units by late 2008-- were not enough to make the company profitable. But now that Palm has its upper tier already situated with the Pre, it can reel in customers with the Pixi like it did with the Centro and have some balance on the upper end..

So what's your take?
Get involved: leave a comment.

• Subscribe to the Computerworld Blogs and IT Blogwatch newsletters
• Catch up with posts from the previous few days

And finally...

• BYOC: Sliding Around
  

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 24 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.