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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) 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?