Palm, Inc.’s lat­est entry-level smart­phone looks to com­pete with Apple’s iPhone 3G

After launch­ing the Pre this past sum­mer to com­pete with Apple’s iPhone and other touch phones, Palm, Inc. is prepar­ing to launch their lat­est device, the Palm Pixi.

The Pixi is designed to be a slimmed-down ver­sion of the Palm Pre: a smaller dis­play with a lower screen res­o­lu­tion (80 pix­els shorter), a less-powerful cam­era (low­ered to 2 megapix­els from 3), and lack of Wifi support.

By reduc­ing these fea­tures, Palm should be able to intro­duce the Pixi at a very rea­son­able price. If they want to remain com­pet­i­tive with Apple, the $99 price point would be most advised, since the iPhone 3G shares a sim­i­lar price and fea­ture set.

How will the Pixi stand against the iPhone 3G? Both fea­ture two of the best mobile oper­at­ing sys­tems; the Pixi will run WebOS, just as the Pre does, and the iPhone runs a vari­ant of Mac OS X. Both phones also have the same amount of mem­ory, sim­i­lar screen size, and cameras.

There are major dif­fer­ences, how­ever. The Pixi has a full QWERTY key­board, while the iPhone only has an onscreen touch key­board. After expe­ri­enc­ing the Pre, I found it dif­fi­cult to type on its small key­board; I can only imag­ine that the Pixi would have a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. I would much rather use the iPhone’s onscreen key­board, thanks to its abil­ity to rotate, hide, change key sets, and it also has great pre­dic­tive text feature.

Another con­nec­tiv­ity. Both phones are 3G capa­ble, mean­ing they’ll be able to run on the fastest cel­lu­lar net­works in the coun­try; how­ever, the Pixi lacks WiFi sup­port. WiFi can be a very ben­e­fi­cial fea­ture, espe­cially in sit­u­a­tions where you would like to down­load larger amounts of data that would nor­mally take a large amount of time, even over the fastest cel­lu­lar networks.

Will the Pixi gain Palm ground against Apple? Only time will tell. My guess is that it will only make a mar­ginal impact; con­sumers look­ing to renew their Sprint con­tracts may def­i­nitely jump on the chance for a new touch phone, but I don’t see a rea­son to choose the Pixi over the iPhone.

The Pixi is expected to be released this win­ter on the Sprint net­work. For more infor­ma­tion on the Pixi, visit palm​.com/​p​ixi.