Palm is the name of the device as well as the company that it belongs to, in a crude way it’s a phone for your phone. There is no other way to describe this device. It is a teeny tiny device that comfortably fits in your palm connects to your Verizon device through its LTE+ and works as a phone.
Unfortunately, I was not able to distinguish its functionality with the currently present smartwatches such as the Apple Watch. During the launch event, when one of the representatives asked people who were calling it adorable and cute would you buy this product or an Apple Watch? You can guess their answer.
Functionality
The purpose of this device is to restrict the average smartphone activity which is what Google and Apple have started to do with their new devices. It will act as a screen when you want to have some distance from your phone, as you can get all your important calls or text messages and typing messages on such a tiny display is an okayish experience.
However, it gets the job done in scenarios where you would want to stay as far away from your phone as possible. Now, it does not mean that the Plam can substitute your phone it is just an accessory that costs probably half the price of your phone.
Plam is not a phone, it works with your phone but as described above it cannot substitute your phone. You cannot watch videos play games or take fancy pictures from this, but when you want to go for a quick job or want some quiet time with your loved one, it does the job. The size is too small to enjoy videos but its enough for playing music, recording workouts or other less intensive in glance tasks. It is the latest brand alongside Blackberry or Nokia to hitch with the Android phones and iPhones. It resurrected the concept of personal assistants from the era that was before the release of the smartphones.
Specifications
The specifications of the device are not surprising at all since it does not require much horsepower to run the apps that it is supposed to run. The 720p display has the pixel density of 445ppi and the screen space as described earlier is 3.3 inches. The camera too is a substantial one the rear camera is 12 Megapixels with flash while the front camera module contains an 8 Megapixel sensor.
It uses the Qualcomm’s lower tier Snapdragon 435 processor augmented by 3GB RAM. The processor and the RAM are more than enough for such a device as no one would install heavy duty apps and games on it.
It also has a proprietary facial sensor which does not get the 3D image of the face, so it is not a reliable piece of hardware. Moreover, the device has no NFC, so if you are about to make payments, you would have to get your real phone out of your picket. The device only has one power button that serves the purposes of any power button. There’s a USB C to charge the device or connect it to any other device. Lastly, the device is IP68 rating so you can take a shower with it and it would work fine.
How does it connect to your phone?
The palm has an LTE connection but uses Verizon’s wireless services to work, the Verzion’s call forwarding services help it to get calls and texts. If anyone calls or texts you both devices will ring simultaneously and during my testing, there was little to no latency.
Since it is an Android device, you can get a lot out of it, it works with the iPhone too but the experience will not be as rigid as it is on an Android device. However, it works with Apple music because the app is on Playstore. You cannot use iMessage or any default messaging app on your phone as it only takes the messages from the message+ app from Verizon. You may have to disable your default messaging app to get it to work.
Typing is a mess
The Palm rocks a 3.3-inch Gorilla Glass 3 screen that uses OLED technology and has a resolution of 720p which is enough to keep things sharp. The UI is completely unique, the icons of the apps are floating around on the display, and they look like small clusters of grape. The UI is colorful, and it is perfectly apt for such a small display.
You can download almost all apps from the Google Play store since it is an Android device, but some apps and games won’t work or at least playing games would be very hard due to the display. Setting up the phone is also a hard task due to messy typing even for a person who has small fingers, though the setup was brief.
Now, palm assumes that most of the typing on this would be done by voice commands so they have particularly worked hard to make voice typing a good experience. During my time with it, the autocorrect also worked fine. However, typing on the keyboard was the worst experience.
Battery
The tiny device only has 800mAH battery which if you think is way less than enough. To cope with such a tiny battery, they have a battery saver mode called mode life mode. It basically restricts the processes that your device is doing and only allows a handful of programs to run. It only allows the apps that you want to run and all else is stopped. For example, when you are working out, you may want it to run the fitness tracker and music app. It suppresses all other apps and stretches the life of even a small 800mAH cell.
Conclusion
To conclude Palm is a strange device, with nothing innovate to be very honest. It does the same tasks that your smartwatch or even your smartphone does nowadays. The only important thing is that it resembles your phone which does not make it better than you regular smart wristband or a wristwatch.
Also, spending almost half of the price of your original smartphone on this device would not one of the best ideas. Lastly, it only works with Verizon services, for the time being, however, the company is eager to make it available on every other carrier too.