The Palm brand is back. A new, 3.3-inch Palm companion phone is coming to Verizon in the United States in November.
Palm’s new Companion phone is supposed to go along with your main smartphone. The point of the device is…uh, unclear. Palm is advertising as a device that you can use when you want to stay present in life. So instead of getting distracted by a big screen, you can now get distracted by a smaller screen. With Verizon’s
The device is powered by a Snapdragon 435 processor, and 3GB of RAM. It comes with 32 GB of storage, a 12MP rear camera, and an 8MP front camera. It runs on Android Oreo 8.1, and it can install any Android app you want. And that makes it work exactly like a phone with a bigger screen.
But the Palm Companion comes with a “Life” mode that silences all your notifications and even mutes any calls so you can focus on things in the real world — when you are out with friends, for example. The feature is quite configurable, so you can still make it so certain notifications come through when the Life mode is enabled. And let’s be honest — none of this is anything unique or different from the new Digital Health features found in Android 9 and iOS 12. It just has a fancy name.
The new Palm phone is made by TCL and it’ll go on sale in November. It’s exclusively available through Verizon for $350, and for an extra $10/month, you can use Verizon’s NumberShare service to use the same number as your main phone on the Palm. It will even sync your messages across both the devices, as long as you use Verizon’s messaging app, of course.