LABS GALLERY: Palm Pixi Has Management Mojo, but Is Otherwise Limited

LABS GALLERY: Palm Pixi Has Management Mojo, but Is Otherwise LimitedBy Andrew Garcia

The Palm Pixi measures in at a tiny 2.2 by 4.4 by 0.4 inches and 3.26 ounces. The Pixi features the same gesture-based navigation as its predecessor, using the capacitive touch screen.

The Pixi comes with a 2-megapixel still camera with LED flash, plus a speakerphone.

The right side of the device houses the volume controls and mute slider, plus a covered jack for the sync/power cable.

The Pixi has a replaceable 1,150 mAhr battery, but to get at it you have to figure out how to peel the backplate off. The Pixi’s battery life can be pretty short with automatic network services enabled, and I frequently found the battery dead in the mornings during my tests.

Using Palm Synergy, the Pixi can synchronize with multiple data services—including Google, Exchange, Yahoo and Facebook—unifying like content from all those sources into a single, easily searchable interface.

The Calendar, like Contacts and Email, aggregates content from online sources. Here, I filtered down to view only my Exchange calendar.

The Pixi works surprisingly well with ActiveSync. Here, it is automatically displaying my existing e-mail folders. ActiveSync works well from the management side, as well. For example, administrators can enforce certain on-device policies, such as like password complexity and length.