Palm Phone (2018)
» see palm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the last words ~
the palm name meant something to me from the pda years. palm pilot, then the pre and webos, a company that kept almost getting the future right and then losing it. the 2018 palm was that name rented out. tcl owned the trademark and put it on a tiny startup in california, and what came out was a 3.3-inch phone you were supposed to buy in addition to the phone you already had.
it launched on november 2 2018, exclusive to verizon in the united states, at 349 dollars. the pitch was that you would leave your big phone at home and carry the small one on a run or a night out, a lighter version of yourself on a separate line for ten dollars a month. it was genuinely small and genuinely well made. it also answered a question almost nobody was asking.
a standalone unlocked version showed up in april 2019. by 2020 the thing was effectively gone, and verizon started listing it among devices it no longer supported. the palm phone did not get a funeral. it just stopped, the way a product does when the category it invented for itself turns out to be empty.
~ the record ~
| Born | 2 November 2018, a Verizon exclusive at $349 |
|---|---|
| Peak | a 3.3-inch phone sold as a companion to your real phone |
| Killed | discontinued around 2020 |
| Lifespan | about two years |
| Made by | Palm Ventures, backed by TCL |
| Killed by | nobody needed a second phone for their phone |
~ the idea ~
the companion phone was a real thought about phone addiction, sold as a gadget. leave the slab at home, take a credit-card-sized screen that can still call and message, come back to your life. the problem is that carrying two phones to use your phone less is a contradiction you feel in your pocket every day. the cure weighed as much as the disease.
~ why it never reached me ~
this one was locked to america at the carrier layer. verizon exclusive, a us line, a device tuned to a market i was never in. by 2018 i was a working engineer in ankara with one android phone and no interest in buying a smaller phone to babysit it. the palm i cared about had already died years earlier, under hp. this was the name showing up to work one last time.
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