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Palm Phone hands-on: an Android phone for your phone

2018-10-15
hey everybody I am dieter bone and if you are of a certain age you know that that means that I am the palm guy I used the Centro I used pixie I use the pre I founded pre central dotnet I was all about webOS all about palm and then it died but now it's fact not the company but the name palm and it's coming back as this little thing that I was hiding in my hand it's a tiny little phone to go along with your big huge hulking phone well what's all that about so this is the palm phone and the basic idea here is you don't want to carry around your big giant phone and so you can have this little weekender phone and it uses horizons dual number system so you pay an extra 10 bucks a month and that allows you to have this phone share your phone number and also you know share text messages so you can leave your other phone behind which is a great idea except there's a couple of caveats if you're an iPhone user your iMessages obviously won't come over if you're an Android user you're gonna need to use Verizon's you know custom text messaging app instead of the built in Android messages in order to catch your messages the other question probably asking is what's the deal with this phone well it's an Android phone and the basic navigation works this way there's a single solitary button on it you press it it turns the screen on you swipe up to unlock it if you double tap it it will launch the Google assistant and it will listen to your voice and you can do voice stuff and they did that because I figured it's a lot faster you're gonna want to be doing a lot of voice stuff now there are no soft buttons on the bottom and so there's this one single solitary button and it works one of three ways so if you tap it once it serves as a back button if you depth if you double tap it it goes home and if you long press it it takes you to this overview screen they have built in a custom face unlock feature into the camera but I'm sure it's nowhere secure as face ID on the iPhone so you can't just use a standard unlock pattern if you want the screen is 3.3 inches and it actually looks pretty good it's not too bad and you know for the basic stuff that it's meant to do it's relatively fast although it is a Snapdragon 435 processor with three gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of storage so this isn't exactly like a powerhouse in terms of specs as far as palm the new palm is concerned you really are just going to be using a few different apps at the same popping in and out so it can run any Android app because it's running Android 8.1 but really they expect you're just gonna use it for music maybe a little facebooking navigation you know that's sort of stuff really simple kind of weekend or phone stuff now there is a camera on this it's a 12 megapixel camera on the back and you know I'm sure it's no great shakes we haven't looked at it on a big screen here but on this tiny screen you know it looks fine there's a conference room and if you want to just volume you need to go into you know the quick settings thing here now the other thing I'll notice when I'm in the quick settings things here is there's this palm and this is where we start to get into why this is a little bit more like an old palm phone at least why they claim it is so when you turn on life mode which is what they call it this basically acts as both battery saver and do not disturb at the same time so when this mode is on you turn the screen off and no notifications will come in and in fact they turn off the radio so not even phone calls will come in so this thing should last a very very long time in this mode it's only got an 800 milliamp battery in it but if you have this vote on the thing I'll probably just hang out you know it's a nerd forever the other sort of cute little palm thing is they've made this shortcut on the lock screen where you swipe up and you get this little like graffiti area with four buttons on it and then you can do a search for you know see running to the clock or you can jump right into the camera or messaging or whatever the home screen here it is just an app launcher there's not two different things and it's in this honeycomb pattern you can of course move stuff around you know drag it around install it and then you'll notice here I long press on an item and that brings up shortcuts to jump directly into things inside the app it's a really underused feature in Android and really glad they sort of foregrounded it here and that even works from that lock screen so if I were to go here and you know write an S it'll jump into different things inside different shortcuts inside the app so like jump right in to scan inside the camera app example or the tribe app so that's kind of I know what you're thinking dieter is this really a palm phone I mean it's got sort of a palm logo on it but it's not running webOS and the only really palm thing about it is that a bunch of other palm phones have been tiny and yeah you're right you should almost think of this more as like a really big SmartWatch than a really little phone you can't buy it on its own it's actually sold on like a connected device a plan so it's not for 10 bucks a month it's 350 or you can get on 15 bucks a month on a you know installment plan and it can do more than a SmartWatch because it can run every single Android app but it can do less than your phone because you know it's got a tiny screen and you're not gonna want to spend that much time on it and that's kind of the whole idea here is this is meant to be a time well-spent phone it's a phone that you turn on do a couple things turn off and ignore and you can even turn on that life mode thing and completely ignore it entirely so it's sort of like a back-up plan to your phone is that worth 10 bucks a month maybe thanks so much for watching we're gonna have a whole lot more about this thing including a review when it comes out in November in the meantime you should subscribe to the channel now because we've got a whole bunch of 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