Palm – The best small phone for minimalists, athletes, and kids
I have a Palm Phone. I&#x27;ve been using it for a year or two now. Full disclaimer that 80% of my phone activities are timing things, emailing notes to myself, and informing my friends I&#x27;ve arrived somewhere or will be late (although I do use other features as well).<p>The positives:<p>+ The small form factor. You can&#x27;t really comprehend how small and light it is unless you see one in person. It&#x27;s almost comical when you first hold one.<p>+ Because the screen is tiny. it&#x27;s incredibly easy to use one handed. You can use swipe text and swipe from the top for notifications and such with your thumb very conveniently. It also fits in my pocket effortlessly.<p>+ The home screen is kind of like Windows Phone in that you have a bunch of icons and you swipe down to view them.<p>+ It never bothers me, ever. Like Windows Phone (prior to 10), it simply never notifies me about much of anything. It is designed to be a device that serves me, rather than actively demand my attention. Nothing changes unprompted. No notifications that cannot be dismissed, and rarely a notification at all. Because it runs Android 8.1, I can disable all the useless notifications that Google added in Android 8.0. Honestly I rarely even get chat notifications unless I have those programs in the foreground, which I find to be fantastic. If the screen is off, I can live in peace. It doesn&#x27;t even have one of those little lights that many other Android phones have on the front to insist upon notifying you about about SOMETHING.<p>The neutral:<p>~ People in public will ask you what your device is if they see it. I find it fun but others may not.<p>The negatives:<p>- Verizon. Everything about Verizon. It sells them for some absurd price like $250, but you can buy them on Amazon refurbished for under $100, which is how I got mine. Also for some reason they marketed it as a &quot;companion phone&quot; and for a good chunk of its life you could not buy this as a standalone phone. I do not use Verizon, but I am not 100% sure if it works as a standalone device on Verizon&#x27;s network (which is a general failing of Android in that your phone provider can somehow control how your device is used). Also because I have mine unlocked, there is one notification upon restart that tells me I am not using Verizon that I have to swipe to dismiss, and there is no way to disable this notification (another failing of Android in general that any notification exists that one cannot permanently disable).<p>- Like most (all?) Android phones, you cannot uninstall a bunch of the useless shovelware it comes with, like Google Play Movies.<p>- Swipe text is a bit harder to use accurately.<p>- If you swipe to the side on the home screen, it brings you to an entirely useless news page. There is no way to disable this (I suppose I could investigate changing the launcher entirely, but I imagine most won&#x27;t work well on a 3.3&quot; screen). If there is a way to disable it I missed in the 15 minutes of mucking around, there&#x27;s no community large enough to have discovered it and posted the solution online. Not something I think about often but something to keep in mind.<p>- Battery life is not great. If you&#x27;re a heavy phone-user, you won&#x27;t like this device. If it were a little thicker, you could get more battery life out of it with the same form-factor benefit. Also, the little hole to eject the sim card is so small that no needles I have will fit in it. But honestly I sometimes let my phone die for a day even when I had a phone with longer battery life, so I don&#x27;t really care.<p>-  The screen resolution is 720p. Some programs are designed for 1080p or greater, so there will be overlapping text or icons.<p>- There will probably never be an update. Nobody knows what it is.<p>Conclusion:<p>For me, it&#x27;s easily the least bad Android phone I&#x27;ve ever had, possibly better than Windows Phone. I&#x27;ll be bummed out when it no longer works with the modern web and programs, but hopefully I&#x27;ll get a few more years out of it at least.