Palm Pixi Coming to Sprint November 15

October 26, 2009 By Geoff Duncan

Sprint will start selling the Palm Pixi smartphone on November 15 for $99.99...with a two year contracts, and $150 worth of rebates.

Mobile operator Sprint has announced it will begin selling the Palm Pixi smartphone on November 15 for $99.99—although that attractive low price reflects a new sale with a two-year service contract, and is calculated after both a $50 instant rebate and a $100 mail-in rebate. The Pixi will be available online from Sprint and at Sprint retail locations, as well as Sprint retail partners like Best Buy, RadioShack, and Wal-Mart.

“We are excited to offer the new Palm Pixi to our customers in time for the holiday season, and it’s a great addition to Sprint’s industry-leading device portfolio,” said Sprint’s senior VP of product development Kevin Packingham, in a statement.

Palm originally announced the Pixi back in early September. The Pixi is both slimmer and lighter than the Pre, coming in at just 0.43 inches thick and weighing just a shade over 3.5 ounces—but the phone still manages to pack a 2.63-inch 400 by 320-pixel touchscreen display, a gesture area for simplified navigation, a full QWERTY keypad, an integrated GPS for location-aware applications, a 2 megapixel camera with flash, and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR wireless networking.

The Pixi comes with 8 GB of onboard storage for media, video, and documents (about 7 GB is accessible to users), and owners can sideload media via a microUSB 2.0 connector, and features EVDO Rev A 3G connectivity. The main things missing from the Pixi are Wi-Fi and expandable storage: the device’s only wireless connectivity is through cellular data services, and there’s no way to load media via microSD cards or other removable storage.

Of course, the Pixi runs Palm’s webOS, and users will be able to download apps and games from Palm’s own application store. Palm is building on webOS’s connectivity features: in addition to talking to Google, Facebook, and Exchange servers, the Pixi will add support for Yahoo contacts, calendaring, instant messaging, and mail, as well as support for the professional-oriented social networking service LinkedIn.

Showing 5 comments

andrew at 9:57pm 26th October 2009 So, this is basically a Palm Pre without the sliding feature, right?
Rytr23 at 2:03pm 26th October 2009 Palm is killing themselves by still not releasing GSM/HSDPA versions of this phone. This Sprint(CDMA) exclusivity has been killing them. They need to get devices out there to add motivation for Devs to port their apps to WebOS. Also, they need to start shipping some improved hardware: Higher Res screens, better than poor keyboards etc.
1. TechFreak at 2:21pm 26th October 2009 Agreed. I was appalled at the small size of the Pre keyboard, and the slider mechanism felt clunky and wobbly. Sprint is a network that is dying fast, their numbers are going down each month and the phones they offer are not appealing while their coverage is poor. Palm has some really great innovations in their new phone, they should have partnered with Verizon which has a good reputation and is looking for that iPhone killer.
TechFreak at 10:59am 26th October 2009 Sounds like it has all the features of the Palm pre. I also like that it has the keyboard out in the open. Would rather have that than a mechanism which could break with prolonged use. Also like that it's slimmer too. Can't wait to see if they make it available to other networks in the future.
1. Dan Gaul at 3:14pm 26th October 2009 Ditto. They do sell the Palm Pre unlocked, but here in the states what good is that if it's a CDMA phone? :(