This article is more than 1 year old

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

A wearable crossed with a mobile? Sounds terrible, but it's lovely

Leading the charge

The main, perhaps overriding, drawback is the battery life. With only a puny 800mAh pack, the Palm has about a third of a typical midrange smartphone.

With Life Mode suspended, Palm claims it should last about eight hours in your pocket, or for "up to" two hours' screen on time (SoT). Or 3h 20m talking. Then again, with a display so small you're not going to be clocking up the SoT for very long.

Charging is extremely rapid. It will charge some 60 per cent in 40 minutes from the feeble USB power output of a MacBook Air port, I found. Or from zero to 100 per cent in 70 minutes. You'll probably want to turn background services off if you can, using the standard Android setting.

That's really the only drawback you can't work around in some way. But it's a big one. I find I need a phone to have at least 30 per cent at the end of the work day in case I'm out later. If I'm not travelling by train or car, mine usually has 65 to 85 per cent remaining as I clock off. So it was unusual to be fretting about the power remaining. Perhaps the accessory Palm really needs is a stylish charger?

When the images turned out well, which was most of the time, they turned out very well indeed with good colour balance and dynamic range. One or two were unexpectedly blurred. Low light and night-time shots were marred by motion, the absence of optical image stabilisation and the slow capture really hurting here. Overall it was better than expected. If the light is good, and your hand reasonably steady, the photo should be pretty good too.

Palm Skyline photo

Click to enlarge

Palm Prudential building photo

Click to enlarge

Palm Chancery Lane photo

Click to enlarge

Palm bananas photo

Click to enlarge

Palm bauble photo

Click to enlarge

In a nutshell

If phone reviews had to include a metric of "Reluctance to Return the Product" then the Palm Palm would rate very highly. It's a smashing bit of design, so unusual in 2018, and I'll be sad to see it go.

As Ben found, the reaction was quite extraordinary - most people were delighted and many said "I'll have that" until they discovered the price. The sting with the Palm is that it's £350 in the UK, which almost instantly relegates it to a niche. That may be a niche that can make Palm money once the "shadow phone" proposition is well understood, and punters realise they can take a secondary phone to the gym and not miss any calls or texts, but it's a lot to pay for any phone these days, in a climate when people are hanging on to them for longer.

"I can wear this running," said a colleague and Palm is clearly mindful of this with its clever range of accessories.

This is the first phone in over a decade I'd even consider wearing on a neck lanyard. The last one, I think, was the Nokia 6230 and after that phones just got heavier again. In fact, wearing it is a big clue to Palm's thinking, as the founder explained here. It is designed to be worn and forgotten, Palm hopes, so that you take more account of the real world.

The Palm is manufactured by San Francisco-based Palm, with the backing of Blackberry Mobile aka TCL, which really deserves a lot of credit for bringing along projects like this one without interfering too much.

There's a vision here that's radically interesting and different, but for many, the Palm Palm's price will deter. In a year's time, who knows? ®

Bootnote

*We're counting anything pre-2007 as the first era - historians, you can quibble all you want. The short-lived heroic failure of the Elevation Partners-funded Palm ended in 2010.

  Palm
Display 3.3" (720x1280, c.445 ppi) Gorilla Glass 3
Chipset CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 435
Software Android Oreo 8.1, Custom launcher
Camera 12MP main, 8MP front-facing
RAM/Storage 32GB storage, 3GB RAM, microSD card expandable
I/O USB-C, no NFC
Dimensions 96.6mm x 50.6mm x 7.4mm, 62.5g
Power 800mAh
Price Vodafone UK exclusive: "Free" on plans of £31 pcm up; £350 on Pay As You Go

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like