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- Verified Buyer
EDIT: to the reviewer who claimed that this cannot be set up on Verizon: yes, of course it can. But there's a catch, which is that Verizon, and only Verizon, SIM cards must be first initialized on a Verizon phone. That's not the phone's fault, it is a Verizon-specific annoyance and it will be true of any new Verizon SIM combined with any non-Verizon unlocked phone. To my knowledge no other carrier makes customers jump through such hoops.Forget the five star reviews that include (usually with exclamation points) words like Cute! or Pretty! or Head-turning Adorable! If you want this phone to work for you in any practical way, it must be plugged inside a Mophie Juice Pack. That changes the Palm from a useless novelty to a practical, and still by any measure extremely small, phone that with a few setting changes will do most anything a giant Samsung can (you weren't expecting to stream movies on this, right?). Double the battery = lasts all day, and a >little< bit bigger and especially thicker turns out to be a good thing when you see just how slippery and fall-prone the phone by itself is (but with or without the pack, it still fits easily into your jeans' change pocket). GET THE JUICE PACK!Initial confusion by the carousel home page was short-lived as you can easily move your most-used apps to the top and then it's just like any other phone. Uninstallable Google stuff and for me some unwanted Verizon apps cannot be moved to another screen, but they can be "deleted" which means they drop to the bottom of the carousel where you don't have to look at them. Bit frustrated by the single external button, not because I expect buttons all over my phone but because you can program it to do only one of three things (I choose volume level).Had a disastrous experience at first with a "refurbished" (actually brand-new but gray market locked Verizon) unit for half the price with a special "non-removable" (unless you are sufficiently motivated!) SIM door and a fatal bug that caused it to reboot whenever a call came in from, and only from, another Verizon mobile number. Returned that and popped for the extra cash to get the real, unlocked version and no more issues.Besides a short-life (or no-life without the Juice pack) battery and the lack of expandable memory, I am on a Tracfone (Verizon in disguise) plan with only 1GB of data a month. Between those three limitations I have become intimately familiar with all sorts of economizing settings in Android that frankly you should already be employing, but you can get away with wasteful behavior on a phone whose battery alone weighs as much as five Palms, contains a 512GB SD card, and is on an unlimited data plan. Be warned, with the Palm you will need to find and activate settings you may not have ever bothered with before like data saver, battery saver, and limiting what apps can download and sync in the background and on cell service. I learned the hard way you can overdo this when Google Maps and Android Auto stopped giving directions but I figured it out quickly enough (download your map on WiFi, turn off "Unrestricted data usage" in the app, but leave on "Background data"). Of course the biggest saver of all was preventing What'sApp from automatically downloading every photo and video my family wants me to see!I have not used the much-touted "Life Mode" and IMHO it's a gimmick - you could just turn the phone off and accomplish the same thing.The screen really is a wonder. If you set objects to maximum size some things will run off the screen in certain apps, but set to Normal, everything displays just as it should. Great job with the scaling and the difference between Normal and Large is essentially imperceptible anyway.I can't bring myself to give the phone five stars because you have to buy the Juice Pack to make it usable. Maybe back when the Palm was first introduced as a phone companion, i.e. a more powerful alternative to a Fitbit, the battery might have been tolerable; but in the two years since it has been available they've decided to market it as a primary phone and they should have come out with a (slightly) thicker and (slightly) heavier battery to make that claim a practical reality. So three stars for the phone by itself, four stars for the phone with its Juice Pack. P.S. shop around for the Juice Pack, don't just automatically buy it from whatever storefront you buy the phone from. Hint, hint.A couple of final notes about the Juice Pack itself, since as of this writing I can't find anybody on Amazon selling it and therefore can't leave a standalone review: exactly what it does is maddeningly difficult to figure out, nowhere in the advertisements, the web site, not even the instructions (such as they are) do they ever say, here's what this thing does. So to clarify: your Palm phone slides inside of it. There's a button on the back; press it once and some lights tell you how much charge >the pack< has (not the phone). Hold the button down and it starts charging the phone and lights start flashing (they go out in a minute). Once the phone is fully charged, the Juice pack turns off. What this means and what they don't tell you is if your phone is 95% charged and you activate the Juice pack, it's not going to make your phone last any longer because in two minutes the phone will be topped off. It would have been fantastic if the pack kept monitoring or querying the phone and automatically added charge as needed (in fact I assumed that's how it worked when I bought it), but that's not how things are; perhaps there's a technical reason why that can't be done. So in reality you will wait until your phone is significantly drained, say below 50%, and then hold the button to start charging. You charge the duo by plugging a USB-C into the >Juice pack< (or placing it with the phone inside* onto a wireless charger, that works out really well BTW since the phone is physically smaller than a typical wireless charger so you don't have to fiddle with it to try to get it centered). The phone charges first, then the pack charges.*I don't know if the pack will charge wirelessly without a phone inside; it did not say one way or the other in the instructions and I haven't had a reason to try it out.Some reviewers of the Juice pack have complained that it interferes with reception; I haven't experimented enough to say for sure about the pack, but it is fair to say that the Palm phone inside its Juice pack has weaker reception than a larger cell phone, call it one bar off. I have lost signal driving through spots that I have reception on other phones; whether this is because of the Juice pack or because the Palm has a weaker antenna (or both) I can't say for sure, but if you live or work in an area with spotty reception, that could be something to consider.I think I like this phone. I've had it about 2 weeks and use it as my primary phone. Yes the battery life is short but that's partly the point of this phone. It's meant to be put in your pocket and mostly not used. Phone calls and a few texts don't kill the battery, surfing does. I bought it to keep from surfing so much on the phone so it's a win. And yes, it's worked at keeping me off the socials, newspapers and work crap.If I start a day with a full charge pocket it and forget about it, it's at 40% by bed time. A 2 hour bike ride listening to Bluetooth music stored on the phone uses about 40-50% of the battery. Generally I plug it in once during the day if it needs it and don't have issues.I've switched at work now to using spotify on my computer to headphones rather than from the phone. If I travel and expect be away from power for a long time, I'll carry a small battery in my bag.Other than that, it's an android phone and works as you'd expect.I really like the size of this phone. I wish more companies made phones this size. It does take some time to get used to texting.One issue with it is the battery doesn't last long. I charge it once every 1.5 days. I keep the WIFI and BT. In that time I make maybe 1 call and a half dozen texts. That is not a big deal for me since I am always near a power source. I think palm could easily improve the battery life by making the phone a few mm thicker.As an aside I did purchase a juice pack to try to extend the battery life, but the juice pack attenuated the RF signal enough to block reception at my home. Your experience with those may be better if you live closer to a base station.For years I have shopped in dismay for the kind of smart phone I envisioned-small, compact and a reliable communication device. Phones kept getting bigger and bigger ostensibly for those who like to spend their lives on them-while I was simply seeking a phone that was reliable and had the speech to text feature that eliminated all that inefficient typing nonsense. At last, I discovered the Palm phone and was excited to give it a try. While it did provide good service, sadly the Google speech to text software is defective. It only records a sentence at a time. When you attempt to resume, it strangely deletes the last word of the previous sentence. I wanted this phone to work so badly I tried a total of three-one of them failed to set up properly and the other two sadly had the speech to text flaw. I find it strange that Palm failed to sort this out in the early going, this feature would seemingly be more important on a smaller phone where typing text could be a challenge. In my opinion, there are probably a few million people out there who primarily want a communication device that doesn't feel like an unwieldy boat anchor in your pocket. I have computers to web surf and require few more on a phone. If Palm can address this one critical flaw, I'll be back. The size and feel is really cool-It just fell short of one important criteria for me.Husband loves the small size that fits in his pocket while he is doing carpentry work. The battery has a shorter life than a regular size phone but he does not use for much more than calling and texting.No funciona en México, no se puede configurar y no se puede contactar con el vendedor, ni existe soporte técnico de Palm.El equipo es como lo esperaba sin embargo no se inicializa, el la web no hay soporte del vendedor ni de palm, no contiene instrucciones para configurarlo.Se detiene la configuración y no permite avanzar o concluir.Estor pensando en devolverloEl las reseñas comenta que funciona en México y no es verdad.Estoy esperando un chip de Verizon para estar seguro si funciona.Se bloquea en el modo de vida útil y no termina de configurase. (ver foto).It's very cute &smart..but looks like battery dry faster than expected..any solution please provide.. thanks
