Palm's $350 credit-card sized smartphone is supposed to liberate you, but it's got some big problems

Palm Phone

Palm, the brand behind popular PDA-style phones in the early 2000s, has relaunched with a credit-card sized phone.
The phone is supposed to act as a companion device to your regular cell that you can more easily use for nights out, workouts, or periods away from your full-fledged smartphone.
The Palm phone costs $350 and is only available through Verizon.
Because of Palm's hefty price and incapability with iPhones, it seems more sensible to just buy one of the many smartwatches out there that have similar uses as Palm's phone.

By now we're all familiar with the criticisms about smartphones monopolizing our attention and replacing our real-world interactions.

Enter the new Palm phone: a smartphone the size of your credit card is out here trying to break up that reliance on tech.

First released in November, the Palm phone is designed to be a travel-sized companion device to your larger, regular-sized main smartphone. The company has branded the phone as an "ultra-mobile" device that allows you to "stay present during life’s most important moments."

Over the course of a few months, I regularly swapped out my traditional iPhone for the Palm phone when I would go out with friends, travel to the gym, or go to dinner on the weekends — situations where I wouldn't necessarily want, or need, my smartphone and all its capabilities.

Here's what it was like using Palm's tiny companion smartphone:

The Palm phone synchs up in real time with your main phone — but that phone needs to be a Verizon phone.

For my review, I was given a Google Pixel 3 with a new phone number that I could use to pair up with the Palm phone. The two phones have the same number so that both can receive phone calls, messages and other alerts.

But the Palm device is only available if you have a Verizon phone. That means if you're on a different carrier, you'll need to go through the hassle of switching if you want to use the Palm.

The two devices sync up in real time, so responding to a message on one phone will also have it show up on the other. I found the syncing between the two phones to be a bit laggy, but that's only when I had both phones in front of me (which is, of course, not the point).

This effortless sync between the phones is made simpler because the devices run on the same Android operating system and pull data from the same Google cloud. The Palm phone is also compatible with iPhones, but we didn't test it with an iPhone so we can't speak to how well it synchs in that scenario. (The company says your blue-bubbled iMessages will show up as green on the Palm phone).

The phone really is about the size of a credit card and is incredibly lightweight. The home screen setup is simple and aesthetically pleasing — any wording or more clutter on the screen would seem overwhelming.

The phone is only 3.8-inches tall and 1.9 inches wide, with one-inch wide bezels on the top and bottom.

Despite it's small size, the phone can run the same apps available for normal-sized phones. With a scant 3GB of RAM though, it's relatively easy to overload the phone's storage and affect the device's performance.

The smaller device and smaller screen dramatically alters the appearance of the websites and apps that you're familiar with, and it takes time to adjust.

Headlines on news articles would often take up the entire screen, and a lot of scrolling was involved to get through a webpage. Gmail was difficult to read, and sorting through my Google Calendar was almost impossible.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider