It might seem natural to mock the Palm Pixi's name, but it's actually brilliant. This cute, little smartphone isn't going up against high-end phones like the Motorola Droid and the iPhone 3GS. Rather, it could replace cheaper texting phones in the hands of slim-fingered people nationwide.

Design, UI, and Voice Calling
If you think the Pixi is too small, it isn't for you. Its size is part of its point: this is a phone for people with nimble fingers and sharp eyes, yet who type a lot. The Pixi is a little black egg, and at 4.4 by 2.2 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 3.5 ounces, it fits into small hands easily. The phone's keys are small and slightly sticky, but definitely manageable because Palm got rid of the Pre's annoying plastic lip around the keyboard.

The Pixi has the smallest capacitive touch-screen I've ever seen on a phone, at 2.63 inches and 320-by-400 pixels. Just like the keyboard, it works perfectly well as long as you don't have sausage-fingers. The Pre's physical home button has been replaced by a virtual, touch-sensitive button just below the screen.

The Pixi's only real design flaw is that it's black. While Palm will sell $49.99 "artist backs" for the Pixi, the prime Pixi consumer loves color. Where are the pink Pixi, the red Pixi, and the green-with-gold-sparkles Pixi?

WebOS is just as much fun here as it is on the Palm Pre. There's something about WebOS, much more than Android, that just makes you smile while you're using it. It's about the gestures; WebOS is all flamboyant little flicks and twirls, pinches and pulls, shrinks and shuffles. It's easy to learn and easy to love (as long as you don't assume it works exactly like the iPhone.)

The Pixi is a decent voice phone, but it won't win any awards. Reception is pretty good. The earpiece is of average volume, and a little muddy; ditto for the speakerphone. There's some in-ear feedback of your own voice when you're talking, which I find pleasant. Transmissions from the speakerphone sound pretty muddy. The Pixi works with wired 3.5mm headsets and automatically paired with our Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset without a problem. There's sadly no voice dialing. Battery life, at 4 hours and 43 minutes of talk time, was acceptable but a bit worrying. You'll need to charge this phone daily.

Messaging
Palm is pitching the Pixi as a messaging phone, and its messaging apps are convenient but still leave something to be desired. The phone brings together contacts from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Microsoft Exchange in one phone book, and merges Google, Yahoo, and Exchange calendars into one calendar.

The Pixi's e-mail client supports Microsoft Exchange push e-mail, along with Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, and POP/IMAP accounts. It displays HTML e-mails beautifully, though you may need to zoom in if you find the text too small. Built-in attachment viewers take care of even the most complicated picture, Microsoft Office document, and PDF attachments.

That's all pretty neat, but Palm's approach has gaps and competitors are catching up. There's no support for Facebook IM or email, unlike on the Motorola CLIQ. Contact cards don't show Facebook status messages, unlike on the HTC Hero.

SMS, MMS, and IM are bundled together into one cuddly app called "Messaging." It's great-looking and easy to use, but only supports AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk—no Microsoft Live Messenger or any social network messaging systems.

The built-in Facebook app is pathetic, supporting only status updates and your news feed. You can comment on your friends' posts, but you can't see their Walls or do...well, much of anything else. It's a miserably spare Facebook experience.

Twitter and MySpace are also left out. You can download one of seven Twitter clients, but the Pixi has absolutely zero app-level support for MySpace. That's disappointing for a phone at least somewhat aimed at teens.

Web Browsing and Apps
The Pixi's primary problem is its scaled-down processor, which meant sluggish responses especially when multitasking. WebOS seems to be a spectacularly processor-heavy OS; even the Palm Pre, which packs a state-of-the-art Cortex A8, is no speed demon. The Pixi uses a Qualcomm MSM7627, which according to Qualcomm has a 600 MHz ARM11 application processor. That's on par with Android phones like the HTC Hero. But with the super-heavy WebOS on board, the MSM7627 seems to stagger periodically.

The Pixi connects to the Internet using Sprint's EVDO Rev A network; there's no Wi-Fi here. The Pixi's Web browser is excellent, though this is an area where processor and screen size conspire to cramp your style. Pages loaded more slowly than on an HTC Hero or Palm Pre on the same network, and the small screen required more zooming and more scrolling than on either of those other two phones. It's a good thing the Pixi supports pinch-to-zoom multitouch. Flash isn't supported, but Palm says that's coming soon.

Other built-in apps include the usual memo pad, a YouTube browser, Sprint TV, Sprint Navigation, Google Maps, and Sprint's NASCAR and NFL apps. Google Maps ran very slowly, but eventually drew attractive maps, and it offered accurate walking and transit directions. Sprint Navigation had trouble finding our location because it required real GPS, as opposed to AGPS signal, but it gave spoken driving directions.

Compared to other smartphone platforms, the Pixi has a pathetic number of third-party apps (about 359 at this writing) and they're generally more basic and less powerful than you'd see on the iPhone. This wouldn't be a problem if the Pixi had the apps it needed for its target market: MySpace, other social networks (PixelPipe's generic uploader app, while helpful, doesn't quite cut it) and lots of fun camera-effects apps, for instance. But the Palm App Catalog still just looks like thin gruel.

Media
The Pixi is a mediocre media phone. There's 8GB of built-in storage for your media, but no media card slot. It syncs music and video with iTunes versions up to 9.0.1; if you've accidentally upgraded to 9.0.2, you'll have to sync it with Windows Media Player or a third-party program like DoubleTwist or Salling Media Sync. The phone plays MP3 and AAC music tracks, but not WMA or OGG. Music sounds fine over wired or Bluetooth headphones. So far, so good.

One noticeable problem is the Pixi's underpowered processor has trouble multitasking music with other applications. Launching another app, or starting to load a Web page, would cause the music to skip. Streaming music from Pandora while reading e-mail didn't cause any skipping, but the e-mail program ran pretty sluggishly.

The Pixi's petite processor also has trouble with video. MPEG4-format videos at 320-by-240 played decently, but anything at higher resolution got jerky. Lip sync drifted pretty badly on a Bluetooth stereo headset.

The built-in 2-megapixel camera takes photos so soft, they're almost Impressionist. But at least it handled a low-light situation without blurring, and it has relatively little shutter delay. There's no video recording.

Conclusions
Obviously, the Pixi is cramped and underpowered compared to Sprint smartphones like the Pre (with its larger screen) and the HTC Hero (with 12,000 apps to the Pixi's 359.) The real competition here is against phones like the free Sanyo SCP-2700 or the $49.99 Samsung Reclaim, or against older, entry-level smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl or Palm Centro.

I'm abusing the Pixi a bit in this review, but compared to those simpler phones, it's far more powerful and way more fun. Web browsing on the Centro and Pearl is awkward. I complain about the Pixi's Facebook app, but the Reclaim and SCP-2700 don't have Facebook apps at all.

The Pixi raises the bar the same way the Centro and Pearl did when they first came out, saying that you don't need to be a "smartphone buyer" to use a little bit of smarts in your phone. It's $99.99 with a two-year contract right now, but I suspect it'll get cheaper with time. It's a good buy for folks with smaller hands who have never had a smartphone before.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 4 hours 43 minutes

Compare the Palm Pixi with several other mobile phones side by side.

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