So, the new player in the arena is the Palm Pixi.
Takes the form factor and accelerometer type screen of the iPhone, and puts a keyboard on the bottom like the Blackberry.
Either it’ll be a huge hit, or more likely, people will say “the screen is too small!” then proceed to complain about the virtual keyboard on their iPhone not letting them type fast enough to reply to people.
I’ve been doing this mobile thing for a long time now. Truth be told, bigger screen doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s your goddamn phone. It fits in your hand. Here’s a trick…move it closer to your face. Amazing, I know. Can’t quite do that though with a virtual keyboard. You have to buy one and connect it to your phone if it doesn’t have one. Or, you could get a phone with one built on.
The Pixi is also 150 bucks, meaning, it’s competing with cheap, dumb phones. You can get a screen with an accelerometer, a phone with a powerful operating system and a lot of flexibility and hackability to play around with, for the price of a lot of dumb phones. And it comes with designer rubberized back plates (probably similar to the rubberized back plate for the Touchstone you can get for the Pre). Though it looks more rugged and comes in a lot of colors. It should also have all the multitasking that the iPhone doesn’t have, and all the special gestures that go with that as well.
I laugh at people who have problems with AT&T and have iPhones. I’ve never had a problem with Sprint, ever. It roams on the Verizon network when it’s out of Sprint network range. Never drops calls. The unlimited data plan is dirt cheap.
Sure, there are the apps, but even then, I’ve seen nothing for the iPhone that I really wanted. It’s all “been there, done that” type of stuff, but done in a million different permutations.
The Pixi makes me seriously wonder why people even bother with iPhones. iPhone OS is just not that great of a platform. It’s monstrously kludgy for the features it provides. My Pre just freaking works. I don’t need to install any desktop component…I don’t even need a laptop or computer for it (aside from software development, of course). The Pixi is the same way. I log in to Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, whatever, and it syncs all my address books together in one place wirelessly. It has universal search (that is blazingly fast, by the way) to pull out people I’m looking for. Comes with Sprint TV, Sprint Navigation, all the organizational apps, syncs perfectly with Outlook calendars. The update is really amazing…all done over the air, it even checks for applications you installed from the app catalog and updates them for you as well if you want!
The thing’s built on linux using web standards for the front ends. The apps are really small and efficient…the whole front end is a browser…but it’s uncluttered up like a desktop browser and is blazingly fast. With webGL, flash, Java, and C# support coming, it’ll do all the gaming you’d ever want. The javascript stuff already does quite a bit more than you’d expect.
All in all, the Pixi looks like a great deal. For those who were concerned about the build quality of the Pre, the Pixi is a simpler, more rugged looking device. Shouldn’t have too many of those problems that you have with moving parts, like a sliding keyboard and such. I didn’t actually think the Pixi was going to be all that great of a phone, but now that I’ve seen the pictures, if it were available when I bought my Pre, I would have had to think long and hard about which phone I wanted more. I still would have taken the Pre, I think, but it would have been close.