The tiny 3.3-inch Palm Phone is on sale in China for 1,999 yuan ($280) from Thursday.
Pre-order for the device started at 10 am Beijing time on October 24. Customers who pay 1 yuan today will be able to enjoy a discount of 50 yuan, Information from China’s ecommerce platform JD.com showed.
Shipment of the device will begin on November 1, when those who participated in the pre-order will have to pay the remaining 1949 yuan.
The JD.com page also showed there are two colors for people to choose: grey and gold.
The Palm Phone runs on the Snapdragon 435 with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage.
It sports a tiny 3.3-inch display, but it has a rather high resolution of 720p. That works or to a very high pixel density.
As cnTechPost noted on Sunday, documents on the website of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show the Palm Phone has recently been certified by TENAA.
The phone runs on Android Oreo with extensive modifications, and an update seems unlikely.
While this device carries the iconic Palm name, it's actually a TCL phone. Like it's deal with BlackBerry, TCL licensed the Palm name and designed a phone around the brand.
The Palm Phone is, well, Palm-sized. It runs Android and has almost the full feature set of a larger phone, but it's all tucked away underneath the simplified UI. For example, the home screen is just a block of scrolling icons.
It has been available for a few months to Verizon customers and on a few international carriers.
The idea behind it is compelling: instead of carrying your attention-sucking phone around, you can carry this tiny thing. It shares your phone number, but it doesn’t share all of the apps and social media angst you have on your main phone.
(Photo: JD.com)
