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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: 1, Offtopic) by Arik on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:07AM (5 children)
That's just not historically accurate.
It's not a start, it's the opposite. The boat you perceive to be coming towards you - is going away.
Google took a free system and crippled it with slaveware, turned it into an extension of their surveillance empire. Yes, it looks ok next to the other brand of slaveware. But it looks like utter crap compared to typical computers from past decades.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 18 2018, @06:09AM (4 children)
It was a discussion about user interface issues, not history or FOSS ideology. Specifically, fixing some of the current UI design trend brain damage on the mobile OS that doesn't lock you out of such things. The implied rest of that comment was "it's a start toward reclaiming function over fashion, one application at a time. Practically everything on Android is replaceable, so it's a first step that I was suggesting should be followed by finding similar functionality-oriented applications to replace the over-sized, over-styled, child-oriented defaults.
I don't disagree, but like it or not (I don't), smartphones currently fall into two categories, "Apple or Android" and "Irrelevant", especially in the US. And of the two, I'd rather use Android, because it's still something like a computer OS, in that you can change most things to suit you and also make use of the Linux underpinnings, whereas Apple is in the market of selling appliances that can only be used in the way the company allows and does everything possible to hide the computer-ness from everyone. I still keep watch for promising alternatives, because I haven't given up the hope that we'll eventually see better options become viable, but for now I make the best of the situation by tolerating Android and doing what I can to fix its retardation.
Kind of going off-topic here a bit but I'm more in the pragmatic FOSS camp, rather than the zealous type of FOSS supporter that wants ideological purity over all other things. (Nothing against the latter, it's just not where I fall on the pragmatism/purity range.) I prefer open source when possible, but I don't begrudge someone else's choice to create proprietary software, and I accept that sometimes it's a valid choice or sometimes even a necessary evil. I think it's important to prioritise and choose the battles that make sense, like OSes are more important to keep free and open (or as open as possible; Android isn't perfect but it's a more open system than iOS) than, say, games. Which is why I have no issue with Steam being on Linux. Games are not a high priority "OPEN SOURCE OR GTFO" target, and their existence on the platform helps bring more mindshare and developer interest, which ends up being a win.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday October 18 2018, @02:55PM
Yes, I understood what you are saying, I simply disagree.
It's NOT a start towards reclaiming anything, it's a faint echo of a better time.
"Practically everything on Android is replaceable"
Too much is not, and each release is further, not closer, to that ideal.
"their existence on the platform helps bring more mindshare and developer interest, which ends up being a win."
It's not a win from my perspective, not at all. More mindshare and developer interest *could* be a good thing, but the devil's in the details.
More often it's a problem. We don't need a zillion Gnome.orgs. We don't even need one of them. Linux would be more useful if the whole basket had stuck with Apple instead of bringing their favorite Apple design flaws to Linux.
I guess there's a fundamental difference in philosophy here, but it has nothing to do with the spurious notion of 'ideological purity' you mention. If there's any room to fit 'purity' into the equation it would be "technological purity" instead.
There are certain abstract properties which make a tool a good tool, or a poor tool. Really good tools are absolutely beautiful to me - the proper combination of function and form, when the tool does *exactly* what it should do, and absolutely nothing else; when it is just so fit for purpose that it cannot be improved - to me that is the height of beauty, the most aesthetically pleasing sight possible.
The opposite of that - when the form is so stunningly unsuited to the function - that is a truly ugly thing.
I used to say very much what you do. What's changed is over the decades I've seen first-hand that what is ugly to me, in this particular application at least, is not *merely* ugly to me, it's actively harmful to everyone in the long run. But that's another story.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 19 2018, @02:04AM (2 children)
Speaking of "irrelevant" but possibly promising... Plasma (as in KDE) Mobile.
https://www.plasma-mobile.org/ [plasma-mobile.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday October 19 2018, @08:55AM (1 child)
Yeah I'm still keeping an eye on that, I remember originally the idea was a separate netbook and desktop UI back with KDE4 and with KDE5, architecture changes made it easier to adapt Plasma to different UIs, including phone. It's taking ages but it's not a commercial product so there might be hope for a long game approach, as long as it's not on HURD's level of long game.
I also really wanted to see Sailfish succeed, but that one clearly went nowhere. :/
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 19 2018, @07:40PM
I like KDE, and generally like KApps, so was excited to see a cellphone interface that might run familiar apps in a familiar way. KDE on a tablet would be interesting. OTOH when I tried Neon on desktop -- ugh, hated it. Well, maybe someday; at least it's an alternative.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.