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Palm rises from the dead as a zombie brand, launches tiny smartphone
If you recall, Palm, creator of the Palm Pilot and WebOS, bombed out of the smartphone market and was purchased by HP. Palm died at HP after a short run of tablets and smartphones, and eventually Chinese smartphone company TCL snatched up the rights to the Palm brand in 2014, and things have been quiet since then. You might know TCL from running that other smartphone zombie brand, Blackberry.
Today, TCL's Palm presents itself as actual new company with new co-founders, a new logo, and an office in San Francisco. The company is launching the, uh, "Palm" phone (Do we call it the Palm Palm?) and it's taking the "Palm" name literally, with a device small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The Palm Palm has a practically microscopic 3.3-inch display, and it measures just 96.6mm tall by 50.6mm wide, which is close to the size of a credit card. Palm is pitching the Palm as a "companion" device to your main smartphone, allowing you to leave your big phone behind and bring the Palm in a wallet, on a lanyard, or in any tiny pocket.
This tiny phone also comes with a really tiny spec sheet. You're getting a 3.3-inch 1280×720 display with a respectable 445ppi. This is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 SoC (that's eight Cortex A53 cores, usually at 1.4GHz) 3GB of RAM, and an 800mAh battery. There's 32GB of storage, a 12MP rear camera, 8MP front camera, IP68 dust and water resistance, USB-C, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and LTE.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday October 17 2018, @06:49AM (1 child)
It's a little smaller than the original iPhone and iPod Touch, which were 3.5". But this thing has 8 times the cores, over 3 times the clock speed, and 24 times the DRAM of the original iPhone.
This is a more unique and interesting direction than the opposite end of the spectrum [tomsguide.com], where you have the Galaxy S10 Plus at 6.44 inches, Galaxy S10 Note at 6.66 inches, and the Huawei Mate 20X at 7.12 inches.
I remember using the iPod Touch's web browser on the tiny screen. It worked. I'm sure at least some people would prefer this device over massive phablets. Nice try with the price though. It's about $250 too much. It probably doesn't need 8 cores, or 3 GB of DRAM.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:19PM
Yes, even more powerful cores, coupled with even more unusable interface, that seems to be the trend.
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