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.
