#FF00AA

I can’t quite pinpoint what Palm’s motivation is for announcing their phones on Apple holidays; whatever it is, it’s definitely not rational. They can’t be so delusional as to think they’re actually detracting from the keynote buzz (if they were delusional, they wouldn’t have been able to produce such a good OS), and I still don’t think they profit much from it, either — so is Rubinstein setting Palm on a suicide course just for the petty satisfaction of knowing that he pissed Steve Jobs just a little bit on the morning of his keynote? Well, come to think of it, it’s the kind of thing you could imagine Jobs doing, and Rubinstein looks to be quite the competent Jobs apprentice, so maybe it makes perfect sense after all.

Anyhoo, about the device: it looks very nice, and I’d like to have it in my pocket — here’s hoping its keyboard gets better reviews than the Pre’s, but at least this time there won’t be technical issues with the slider’s hinge. The big surprise (whereas the Pixi is pretty much everything you expected the Centro’s successor to be) is that it’s still a Sprint exclusive, when everyone thought Palm would be in a hurry to deliver a handset to Verizon. I have a hard time imagining the carrier pays Palm such a nice fee for the privilege, but it could be about marketing: I guess, as long as Sprint has the exclusivity, they have an incentive to share the burden of advertising the device and the OS in a way that multiple carriers wouldn’t.

But would you really want to buy a smartphone without wifi? Price hasn’t been discussed yet, but everyone expects it at $99 — the same price as the iPhone 3G, which has the same capacity, a bigger screen (okay, that one’s an arguable choice, since the point of the Pixi is that it has a keyboard), a wifi connection… and it’s an iPhone.

I understand that Palm doesn’t want to be seen as undercutting the iPhonebecause their phones could then be perceived as inferior (and, well, maybe they can’t afford to), but the lack of wifi makes the Pixi a very definitely inferior product selling at or around the same price — not just because wifi allows better connectivity when a hotspot is available, but because there are many useful applications that rely on your device being able to communicate directly with your computers on your home network. Once again, they stop so very short of actually being competitive.

And, really, even if Sprint launched it at $49 or $59, I don’t think that would make up for the lack of wifi; as it stands, the Pixi only makes sense as a nice feature phone — with the cool webOS interface, and a full keyboard, great for calling, texting, and emailing — but not a real smartphone. And, while there is a market for such a thing, it’s still a damn shame when you think of the lost opportunities.