Palm WebOS, Pre and Pixi – Where Are We Now?

Pixi Keyboard – Possible Perfection

While the debate of software vs. hardware keyboards rages on, Palm seems to have dug into its position. Pixi’s keyboard is the best evidence yet that Palm truly believes in the hardware keyboard paradigm and has invested heavily in the area. It’s hard to overstate it – Pixi’s keyboard is outstanding. It’s almost desktop-like (or at least laptop-like) in its feel. The keys are raised, vastly more so than on the Pre. Spacing is reasonable, about as much as you can expect on such a small device. The throw of those keys is the real shining star – there’s a definite feel of movement there and an extremely audible, satisfying click with each stroke. This is the type of keyboard that a touch-typist would love. You can easily use it with your eyes closed, in your pocket, or while walking down the street (though hopefully not while crossing the street in traffic…). Unless you have huge fingers (and in that case any mobile device will be a problem) you will be able to fly on this thing. For my money this is the best mobile device keyboard I’ve ever used. Yeah, it’s that good.

If the Name Sounds Wimpy…

The hardware design, especially from a user experience aesthetic, is good, maybe even great, and in a lot of ways superior to that of the Pre, so long as you can get past the smaller screen. What about the actual real-world performance? This is where it gets a bit… maddening.

Pixi clearly doesn’t have the horsepower of Pre and that’s obvious from the minute you pick it up. Whether it’s actual physical horsepower in the form of a slower CPU and less RAM, or a lack of software optimization, everything is just…slower. There’s a lag—a noticeable lag—apparent in most actions you’ll perform. I’d compare it to using computer with a runaway process eating CPU, or one that just lacks RAM and is constantly paging the hard disk.

In the extreme circumstance, it crops up when you attempt to answer an incoming call by dragging the lock icon into the appropriate area. If you miss, or just foul up that motion, which happens all the time when answering on the go or in a hurry, that little lock icon can sometimes get into a state where it just hangs. You have to wait a second or two before the system picks up again and you can repeat the action – and hopefully get it right. If you don’t, you’re likely to miss the call, as it will lag again, and well, you get the idea.

Another place where abysmal performance rears its ugly head is in relation to Synergy and contacts. If you have a lot of contacts and are linked to multiple sources (which is of course, the point, and wonder of Synergy) you are likely to see some associated lag when scrolling through those contacts, though it’s not a particularly horrible or unusable experience. However one specific instance that I encountered was a different story. It had to do with the pictures linked to contacts, specifically from Google Talk. In my case, a contact who uses a picture with their Google Talk profile - and that’s a real, full size picture, not a GIF piece of clip art – seems to completely lock up the phone. It must have something to do with how some combination of Google Talk, Synergy and the Pixi download and/or cache such an image. I guess they just clog up some pipe somewhere. If contacts are linked to Gmail, and I scroll through my contacts, when I encounter one with such an image, the UI then completely freezes. If I wait 10 or 15 minutes, it might come back to responsiveness, but in most cases, the device wouldn’t ever come back to life, preferring to revert to a chunk of unusable plastic. The only way out of the cycle of hanging is to power cycle the phone via battery remove – oh and when it’s frozen, I can’t receive any calls – they seem to get routed right into voicemail.

Eventually, after several hours, and a trip to the Sprint store (I thought my device was a lemon, so I returned it…) I found that the only way to prevent this behavior was to get into the Gmail setting for each contact associated with Google Talk, and deactivate the setting allowing them to apply their own picture in my UI. Additionally, I actually had to delete the picture in “Contacts” in Gmail. I also had to go back in and delete any correspondence (text messages, chats, etc.) where their picture showed up. This seems to keep Pixi happy, for whatever reason. This doesn’t happen with a Pre. Interesting.

It’s actually a little surprising that this level of performance got past Palm’s and the various carriers’ quality control processes. In some cases the performance issues are near show stoppers. Browsing the various Pixi user and owner forums, the phone’s general performance has been a widespread problem since launch.

The WebOS 1.4 Update

The good news though is that this seems to be getting better with each subsequent revision of WebOS and most recently, patch 1.4 has seemingly breathed a new life into the Pixi. The input lag is much, much less, if not non-existent. Yes, there are still some moments where a gesture or touch is ignored, or misinterpreted, but it appears to be no worse now on Pixi than on the Pre.

In some recent side by side testing, Pre and Pixi, at least their Sprint implementations, have nearly identical performance now. Applications launch with the same amount of waiting and performance in those apps is similar, if not the same. Boot up time, at over 2 minutes 40 seconds is still too slow, but again, it’s the same across both devices.

Here are some performance comparisons of the two devices, in their Sprint incarnations, all times in seconds:

As you can see, application launch times are pretty neck and neck, though with a couple notable differences. First, we have Google maps. Pre launches Google Maps with 7 seconds less waiting and that 44% boost is quite noticeable in practical use. The other is a bit of an oddity – Pixi gets into the App catalog faster than Pre, by over 3 and a half seconds. Tough to explain, but consistent over the testing period.

Of course when we’re talking about performance, the Pre still has a leg up on the Pixi, and the Pixi Plus has the same leg up on its non-plussed predecessor, in that the original Pixi still lacks WiFi. With WiFi disabled, Pre and Pixi load webpages at extremely similar speeds. Fire up WiFi on the Pre though, and you’ll see Pre jump ahead significantly when it comes to browsing. Of course this is heavily based on things like the bandwidth of the internet access on the other side of said WiFi, as well as signal strength etc, but it’s safe to say that performance wise, WiFi will exceed whatever 3G access was available, and this gives any of the devices with a WiFi radio a distinct advantage. It’s a shame Palm chose to cut costs by removing WiFi from its 1st generation Pixi. As has been a theme though with Palm’s evolving WebOS line, they got this right with the Plus version.

So let’s look at some web page rendering times, with all things being equal – WiFi disabled:

For the most part, the results are as expected. In most cases, for full, non-mobile versions of these sample sites, Pre renders faster. Not really anything earth shattering there.

The surprise though is in the mobile sites. These seem to favor Pixi’s rendering engine, by some significant percentages. This could be because of the Pixi's lower resolution screen.

Interesting stuff. Pixi’s browser seems to just like those mobile sites and is able to render them, at least in the case of Arstechnica.com, in nearly half the time.

Of course, bandwidth is bandwidth, and with more of it, everything simply loads faster. So let’s turn on Pre’s WiFi radio (which is connected to a Road Runner cable modem) and look at some results there.

Free of the shackles of EVDO, and fueled by a juicy broadband connection, Pre’s browser runs loose and free and blows Pixi out of the water with the full site loading.

I’m thinking that the Pre browser just has some issues with the mobile CNN.com site. Whether this is some kind of CSS issue, or what, I’m not sure if we should look at those results without some suspicion. I’ve noticed in practical use that CNN.com seems to act oddly on the Pre at times. On occasion it will fail to load, or just take an excessive amount of time. Bottom line though, again, with WiFi to a broadband connection, Pre seems to shine, save that one case.

Once again, Palm’s continued work on WebOS is proving its worth. They might have had a lemon on their hands with the Pixi at launch. Now, several patches later, including the recent and excellent WebOS 1.4 Pixi might be a legitimate contender for your hard earned dollars.