PhoneScoop: Palm Pixie

[0]This is the new Palm Pixie. This is our latest addition to the WebOS line of products It is the smallest product that we have ever made. As you can see, it is extremely thin, compact and stylish. It shares a lot of capabilities with the Pre including the intuitive WebOS as well as a multi-touch screen. The touch screen on this product is a 320 by 400 capacitive touch panel screen you can use gestures to go in and out of applications to delete list items, to scroll, as well as you can use the touch to zoom in and out of web pages. In addition to the display area the gesture area in black at the bottom of the display area is also touch sensitive. So I can use this area to go back, I can use the center bar here to go into the card view. I can also do swipe up to bring up the launcher. So both the display area as well as [1]the gesture area are touch sensitive and I can use gestures in both places To round off the front of the device, we have a full QWERTY keyboard which is exposed so someone who wants to send a quick message can do that without having to worry about opening the slider, which on the Pre provides us a bigger screen Lets turn to the side. As I mentioned its an extremely thin device and you can see this in the side profile. Its more than 10% thinner than the iPhone 3GS and more than 20% thinner than any BlackBerry model out there today. At the top as you would expect from any Palm phone is a ringer switch so you can easily put the phone to silent mode when you are in a meeting or in a cinema hall. The volume up down buttons and nicely tucked in here is the microUSB port which allows you to charge through the wall adapter or also connect to the PC for trickle charging, for moving files back and forth as well for doing iTunes sync for your DRM free music [2]Turn back and you have a 2MP camera with an LED flash. The camera is optimized to take really quick pictures and because of the flash you can take pictures even in dim environments. 3.5mm standard headset jack so you can use your favorite headsets for listening music and you can always be on hands free phone calls as well. Lets talk about the back cover. The back cover is removable and completely replaceable. The back cover you are seeing right now is the standard one that we ship with. You can use an optional inductive back cover and the phone TouchStone compliant so if you have a TouchStone charging accessory you can charge the phone using the inductive back cover. In addition to that we are talking personalization on this phone to a new level. As you can see, we are announcing the availability of the Palm pixie artist series back covers. We have worked with 5 California artists on these really [3]interesting designs which allow our end users through art rather than just through color. And we feel the end users in this category will really enjoy that These will be available at the time when Pixie becomes available by the holidays this year and the other thing to notice all these back covers are also touch stone compliant. So I can take one of these and place it on the TouchStone and you will see its magnetic so it can be used to charge through the TouchStone as well. So thats the Palm Pixie. Lets talk about Facebook. As you already know with WebOS, when we launched the Pre we have Facebook integrated into contacts, calendar as well photo upload So you can easily upload photos to your Facebook account. Now complimenting that functionality with a dedicated Facebook application as you can see here Application which will be available with the Pixie allows me to update my status It gives me access to my entire newsfeed so I can stay on top of whats going on in my friends [4]lives. I can comment on their status and I can also view their pictures. In this case, Kate, who is at Fashion week in New York, has just uploaded an album of all the pictures she took there. I can look at these pictures pretty much like the default photos application on the device. I can flick through the pictures using the gestures. I can double tap to zoom in double tap to zoom out. I can turn the device around and view the picture in landscape mode as well. Turn it back. Flip back to the first picture. Tap on it. I really like the picture. So I am going to actually leave her a message. I can send her a message on Facebook so this gets posted on Facebook right when I do it here on the client side This is an example of the kind of new functionality that will be available with the Palm Pixie. The other area where we have been doing a lot of work [5]is our application catalog in SDK. As you know we announced beta for application catalog including eCommerce recently. It will go out of beta by the end of this Fall. And thats when we will start talking general submissions. But I wanted to showcase a couple of third party applications that we have here on the phone and how those are integrated in the rest of the system. So lets look at the iLike concerts application. If you like music and you would like to go to a concert there is no better way to plan it than the iLike application. So when the application loads at the top I see the name of the city where I am currently as well as list of concerts around me listed by date as well as popularity. I can also filter them using other criteria such as venues. So if I am interested in lets say the Fillmore I can just type the name and it will filter the list and in this case I am going to bring up the [6]Fillmore and it will tell me all the shows that are going to take place in the Fillmore in the new near future. So I am a big David Cook fan. So I am interested in this concert. All the information that I need in order to plan for the concert is available right here. It tells me the date, it tells me the location if I want to go with a friend I can tell a friend and this is the kind of integration I am talking about. It immediately composes an email and takes me to the email application and it precompose the email included all the information as well as a URL link to the show and I can just type in the to field the name of my friend that I want to send it to in this case, Kate, and then just send the email. We allow all our third party this kind of integration, so the applications, the third party applications are not isolated. They are not silos but they are very well integrated into the native functionality of the device. One other point of integration is calendar. So I want to add this event to my calendar [7]so I dont forget. Sometimes I forget whether I booked the tickets for the Monday or the Tuesday. Now it gave me a notification that it has been added to the calendar. We can go launch the calendar application and I can see there is the David Cook show at Fillmore 8 o clock.

Channel: phonescoop