The Palm brand name hasn’t been attached to a smartphone in almost a decade, but it looks like it’s going to make a comeback, as a new Palm-branded phone has leaked.
But this is no iPhone X competitor, or really a rival to any major phone, as it’s absolutely tiny, and would be coming from TCL, the maker of the rebooted BlackBerry phones.
According to a source speaking to Android Police, the phone – which is apparently codenamed ‘Pepito’ – has just a 3.3-inch LCD screen, potentially making it a godsend for anyone who hates the trend of ever larger phone screens.
It apparently has a 720p resolution, which at that size could actually be pretty sharp, and it also supposedly has an appropriately-tiny 800mAh battery.
The rest of the specs aren’t quite so small, as the Palm Pepito is said to have 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a Snapdragon 435 chipset. That’s low-end indeed but puts it roughly between the Nokia 5 and the Moto G6, rather than at the very bottom of the smartphone heap.
You can see images of the new Palm and its tiny battery above, showing off a single-lens rear camera, a curvy shape and a metallic frame, but unlike earlier Palm phones there's no hardware keyboard.
Apparently it will come in titanium and gold shades, and run Android 8.1, but doesn’t have a headphone jack.
What the source doesn’t say is how much the Pepito will cost or when it will launch, but it sounds like it might not be widely available, as all they know on that front is that it’s coming to Verizon in the US.
We’d expect it will land at the very budget end of the market assuming all this information is true, but whether there even is much of a market for a phone that small remains to be seen.
