Review: Palm Pixi Is Worthy Successor To Centro

Using Palm Synergy, these accounts are melded together, giving the user unified views of emails, calendars and contact lists from all sources – with the flexibility to filter down to a source’s content, if needed. This allows users to seamlessly blend personal and work content on the device, without mixing it up on the back end.

Corporations already using Exchange and ActiveSync will find that WebOS and the Pixi play nicely with some ActiveSync policies, allowing administrators to enforce policies defining password complexity and length, screen inactivity auto-lock periods, and automated (given too many failed password attempts) and manual remote-wipe capabilities right from the Exchange management console.

Battery Life

Like the Palm Pre, the Pixi can easily burn through battery life – particularly if background data services are enabled – and the Pixi’s battery is even smaller (1,150 mAhr) than the Pre’s.

Although the Pixi is rated for 5 hours of talk time with a 3G network connection (or 350 hours standby), on numerous occasions I found the Pixi battery dead in the morning, even when I had fully charged it at the end of the previous work day and not used the device at all in between.

With the Pixi, it is imperative to limit automatic background consumption as much as possible. To save battery life, instant messaging and GPS location services should be disabled, and automated email retrieval should be performed infrequently (or manually only).

Unfortunately, WebOS does not allow the user to globally set the email retrieval period for all accounts. Instead, the period must be configured one by one, as different types of accounts and synchronizations come with differing default periods. For instance, Exchange and Yahoo Mail use push email services, while Gmail defaults to a 15-minute pull interval.

When actually using the device, I found battery life lived up to the rated specifications. A solid hour of heavy usage – browsing the web, reading and responding to email, and moving between and using other applications without ever letting the screen dim – would drop the battery by about 20 percent.

Inconsistent Performance

My other qualm with the Pixi has to do with inconsistent performance.

Every now and then, the Pixi would simply stall out during an action, pausing for several seconds before getting on with what it was supposed to do. It didn’t seem to matter what the action was – it would sometimes happen, for example, when I opened an application, moved from one screen to another or opened an email. The behavior also did not seem to depend on how many applications were open in the background, nor was the behavior consistently reproducible in similar circumstances.

Fortunately, I found this sluggishness diminished once the device was upgraded to WebOS 1.3.2, although it did not disappear entirely.