Overall, the design is great, and the only thing that immediately bugged me is the placement of the on/off button. It’s located at the upper left, slightly in the back. This is the button that you press to put the phone to sleep or wake it up. In my opinion, it is a poor placement for a button that will be pressed very often.
As I said above, 2.63″ the screen is relatively small, but in general it works well. It is only when I use multitouch gestures that I feel cramped. That’s particularly true with Google Maps because that application has a several clickable items on the the map at all times. Still, these gestures make Web OS more user-friendly than Android sometimes. WebOS works very well on the small screen, stuff like email or web browsing are totally usable.
The touch screen is sensitive and accurate: it is relatively easy to place a text cursor in between two letters, for example. Just underneath the screen, there is a touch sensitive surface where you perform gestures like “back” or “up”. That’s a WebOS thing, and it works really well, but that also occupies a substantial surface that could have been used to extend the display… Note that the screen can only reproduce 18-bit colors (262,144 colors) instead of the 24-bit (16.7M colors) that many screens can, but in practice, I did not find this to be a problem.
The keyboard is a little worrisome when you look at it, but I quickly realized that it is one of the best that I’ve used. I can type fast with it, and it is second only to my Blackberry Curve 8900, and better than my Curve 9700. The keys click sharply, but gently, and the feel is just great. They are also made of a soft material, so when you press them, they seem to deform just a little bit and absorb the excess pressure. If the keyboard was wider, it could do some real damage to Blackberry, at least in my book. Remember that keyboard preferences are a very personal thing. My best advice is: go to a store and type with it.
Placing a call is very easy: you can either type a name to find a contact or click on the Phone app to dial a number on the virtual numeric pad. The audio quality is average to below average. I found the sound to be a little muffled (like the Droid) and the volume is kind of soft. The back speaker is too weak for a phone conversation if you are not in an ideal environment (quiet room). These issues aren’t deal breaker, but definitely good to have on your radar.
More good things: the “drag to unlock” worked very well. It is easy and simple. I like it. Note that if you use the Facebook App, WebOS will merge your contacts and retrieve a profile photo of your contacts whenever possible. That’s cool.
Bizarre: while I was sitting in my couch, EVDO reception quality was varying wildly from 1 to 5 bars every few minutes… go figure.
Email: With Exchange, POP and IMAP supported out of the box, it is easy to setup email. If you are using a popular email provider, simply adding your email and password is enough for the Pixi to setup an account. In my case, I’m using an Exchange server, so I had to type in more information manually but it was quick too. The notification system at the bottom of the screen works well, even if you can only see the last item. If you have more than one accou
nt, it is possible to look at a combined inbox, but if you want to, you can also look at individual accounts. Typically, you can see only 3 emails on the screen and you will have to scroll down or open an item if you want more information.
Email search: in the “Inbox” view, you can simply type and it will initiate a search. This is handy and the search is fast enough.
Misc: There is no Gmail app, so your Gmail will be treated like a regular POP or IMAP account.
Messaging: Out of the box, the Palm Pixi supports SMS, MMS, Google Talk, AIM and Yahoo Messenger. It’s far from complete, but it covers a good user base. Check if that works with your particular group of friends, but I personally miss MSN Messenger a lot, and I don’t really want to port all my MSN contacts over to Yahoo. Overall, IM and SMS/MMS work fairly well. The other app that I miss a lot is Skype.
Facebook: The support is minimal: you can pretty much update your status, view the news feed and vote/comment. That’s it and it’s too little. You can also go to Facebook for mobile to get more features. It’s not as fast an “app” though.
The page rendering is on par with Android phones, but I noticed that the image reduction was not as good as like the Droid or the iPhone. Palm uses a filtering that looks less smooth, but it might require less processing however. Javascript seems well supported and things like our Disqus comments work. during the loading itself, things can get very slow, but once the page is fully loaded, gets better. I had a mixed experience with web browsing. Sometimes, it would be fine and work normally, sometimes it would be really slow and not reactive at all. The phone would hang for a few seconds and come back to life. Clearly, the web experience is jeopardized by the performance, but if you use mobile websites (like m.cnn.com or ubergizmo.mobi) that use less memory, it will work much better.
If you don’t know that the Palm Pixi does not have Wi-Fi, you are probably glad to learn this now. Yes, we all prefer “with WiFi”, but the question is: is it a big deal? First, it depends on how good your 3G reception is: if it’s too weak or non-existent, then it sucks. Move on and forget about the Pixi. During this review, I mostly had 3 bars, with episodic jumps to 1 and 5. Overall, the Pixi worked OK and at no point and screamed “why doesn’t it have Wi-Fi?!”. So my best guess is that it’s OK for the average user, and even streaming movies from YouTube worked well (see video later in the review). I’m won’t enter in the “why did Palm remove Wi-Fi?” debate – it is really their choice, and ours is to buy or not.
The Palm Pixi has a user interface look and feel that is similar to the Palm Pre. I’m not sure if I should dive into a long review of the WebOS here (let me know in the comments), but here are the highlights:
User interface: Overall, Palm has an excellent user interface. The learning curve is not steep at all. I think that this is a first-class user interface that is relatively fast – if you use the Pixi as a mono-task device.
Copy/Paste: The copy/paste function is not impressive to start with, but the slow speed of the Pixi makes it even worse. Anyway, I find myself re-typing short bits of text, rather than copy/pasting.
Misc: The App store works well and it is easy to find applications… when they exist. Palm’s library is much smaller than the competition. However, the sheer number of apps don’t mean much to individual users, so I would recommend you to take a look and see if what you want/need is there. The Pixi is a good smartphone out of the box, but if you can’t live without Skype or a decent version of Facebook, this might not work for you.
USB connection: Upon connecting your Pixi to a computer via USB, you will be asked if you want to Sync, Charge or Mount it as a USB drive. If you choose the USB drive option, the phone won’t be able to receive/place calls. This is weird, but important to remember: you might miss a call if you forget to unplug it! Copying file was also relatively slow: two files (27MB combined) took 40 seconds to copy over.
Stuff happens: During this test, my Pixi decided to wipe itself out one day. Call it “reboot of death” but one morning, it said that my Palm account no longer existed. I asked it to reboot *without wiping itself*, but it did wipe itself anyway… wow. I don’t think that this is a widespread problem. I’m probably just very unlucky, but wanted to document this, in case it happens to someone else. Update: this might be a bigger issue than I thought. Others are reporting account+data losses as well.
The performance is really the Pixi’s soft spot, to say the least. For some of you, this might be called a deal-breaker. It is noticeably slower than the Palm Pre (and other phones). From the outside, the issue eems to be a combination of the slower processor and smaller memory size, but “why” doesn’t matter: this effectively translates into a device that is relatively and prone to become even more sluggish as more apps are loaded. It can become downright unusable. You may have seen reports of hangs, momentary freezes and slowness to come back from sleep mode. I have occasional
ly experienced all of that, although it crashed “only” a couple of times this week. But when that happens, it is frustrating! If you have many accounts (Google, Exchange, Yahoo, Facebook…), the phone becomes really sluggish during Sync operations.
There’s no video capture, so this portion of the review is short. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a deal breaker or not. What do you think? Post a comment.
YouTube: Playing YouTube movies over 3G worked very well, even with 3/5 bars. The video quality was very good (see video), but with the small screen, it is hard to get a “cinematic” experience. That said, it’s more than enough to enjoy a short clip here and there.
Music: Just like most phones that I have tested recently, the Music Player works fairly well, and the user interface has all the basics. The search is also well done: within a category (artists, albums, songs, genre) you can type a search keyword. No complaints.
Video playback: I’ve copied a few PSP Mpeg4 movie trailers to the Palm Pixi and it was able to play them flawlessly. If you have .mp4 files for mobile content, you will probably be able to enjoy them. For reference, here are the details of the file that I have tried (mp4v codec 368×208 29.97fps, stereo 48Khz 16bits AAC).
With moderate usage (push email always ON, moderate browsing), You can get anywhere between 14h and 20h. this can vary widely depending on whether or not background tasks are running or how long the display stays on and how bright it is. The bottom-line is that you will need to charge it every evening or you will have a dead phone.
Out of the box, you can open and view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but it looks like to need to upgrade DocsToGo in order to edit. At least, it’s possible at some level.
The phone has also crashed when I was attempting to open a simple Excel file (it always crashes with that particular one). I blame the app, but an OS should never crash… I had to pull the battery out.
When you get a phone with a contract, the contract costs $1400 to $2500 over two years, depending on which service level and carrier you choose. That’s before taxes and fees. In that context, the actual price of a smartphone (after discounts+rebate) counts only for 15% or less of the total cost of ownership. The first thing that you need to tell yourself is that a $50 or $100 price difference really doesn’t change things all that much. Always look at the total cost of ownership when you choose a phone+carrier you can save hundred of dollars.
On the surface, the Pixi is a very attractive phone. It has a great, intuitive, user interface. However, to overcome the performance issues, users have to use the Pixi as a very basic smartphone: try to do as little as possible with it, and it might run just “OK”. While this is really your choice to put up with the slow performance (again check the video to see if you think it’s “too” slow), I would personally not go for it. As good, small and light that the Pixi is, it should have been built with as a faster phone, period. If you like Sprint as a carrier, you can look at the HTC Hero (read our HTC Hero Review) or simply go for the Palm Pre itself ($99 – check our Pre Review here). If your horizons are wider, check the links below and read our other smartphones reviews. If you are just in love with the Pixi’s design, I understand, but you have been warned.
Palm Pixi photo samples (gallery), Palm Pixi misc apps photo gallery