Palm's Pixi smartphone launches this weekend: the smaller, cheaper baby sister to Palm's Pre and another Palm smartphone exclusive to Sprint in the U.S. But what should be a celebratory event for Palm is instead reviving the question of whether Pixi is arriving too soon. Seeing as it's so similar to the Pre -- with sparer features and a lower price tag of $100 after rebates -- why do it at all, Palm?
Palm confirmed the Pixi launch in late October, saying it would be available for $100 after a $50 instant rebate, $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year contract lock-in. Pixi will be available at Sprint stores, Best Buy, RadioShack and select Wal-Mart locations, where apparently it's already been spotted.
Palm is positioning Pixi, in the words of Sprint's senior vice president of product development Kevin Packingham, as a phone that's "fun and easy to use." It offers a full keyboard, 2.63-inch multitouch display, GPS, 2-megapixel camera and Palm Synergy, an aggregating tool for social networking outlets like Facebook, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, LinkedIn and Yahoo.
Perhaps most importantly for Palm, the Pixi also advances the number of phones using its WebOS mobile platform, for which Palm is actively trying to entice open-source developers.
There's no question Palm's Pre has helped stabilize Palm's handset business -- Pre is thought to be responsible for most of the small, but encouraging gains Palm made in its most recent quarterly earnings. A smaller, cheaper version of the Pre -- which in effect, the Pixi is -- might be enough to interest consumers on the lower end, especially with its strong social networking flavor.
But with Palm Pre failing to have ignited the firestorm seen in new smartphones like, say, the Motorola Droid, another new Palm smartphone so soon might do as much to cannibalize Pre sales as advance Palm's WebOS agenda. It's hard to imagine at this point that the Pixi won't be another also-ran in this season's heated smartphone competition, which features everything from the latest in Google Android-powered phones to a number of lower-end quirky devices already available.
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