Palm Pixi Now Official, Coming to Sprint For the Holidays

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September 9th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder0 Comments

The other webOS phone from Palm, the oft rumored Palm Pixi (originally spelled Pixie), has been officially announced, and it’s coming to Sprint “in time for the holidays.”

The device is the thinnest phone Palm has ever produced. Like the Pre, it also has a full QWERTY keyboard, but in a candy bar body. Other specifications include 8GB of onboard storage, a 2 megapixel camera equipped with flash, a 2.63 inch capacitive display with a 320×400 pixel resolution, and…no WiFi.

It’ll also come in many different colors and designs as part of something called the Palm Pixi Artist Series, which will offer a selection of limited-edition back covers for the device. As far as price goes, since Pixi is Pre’s younger brother, it’ll probably be lower than $149.99 which is how much Sprint is currently asking for the Pre.

Source – http://mashable.com/2009/09/09/palm-pixi-now-official-coming-to-sprint-for-the-holidays/

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TECH – iPhone 3GS Performance: A Significant Performance Bump

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

You may have noticed today’s review of the Palm Pre. While I strongly suggest reading it if you’re at all interested, I do have some new data for your consumption. After the announcement of the iPhone 3GS I posted an article discussing the hardware specs of the 3GS. I outlined the single chip CPU/GPU SoC as follows:

	iPhone 3G (ARM11)	iPhone 3GS (ARM Cortex A8)
Manufacturing Process	90nm	65nm
Architecture	In-Order	In-Order
Issue Width	1-issue	2-issue
Pipeline Depth	8-stage	13-stage
Clock Speed	412MHz	600MHz
L1 Cache Size	16KB I-Cache + 16KB D-Cache	32KB I-Cache + 32KB D-Cache
L2 Cache Size	N/A	256KB

The iPhone 3GS uses an ARM Cortex A8 processor running at 600MHz, much like the Palm Pre. Many weren’t confident that the 3GS used the new ARM A8 core instead of a higher clocked ARM11, so after waiting in line to grab a 3GS this morning I decided to run a few tests (the iPhone 3G tests were using OS 3.0 and the Pre tests used OS 1.0.2).

Update: Thanks to the many readers who have pointed out my incorrect wording of the 3GS’ performance improvements. The tables in the article have been updated to reflect the correct percentages. I appreciate the corrections 🙂

WiFi	Apple iPhone 3G	Apple iPhone 3GS	Palm Pre	T-Mobile G1
anandtech.com	16.3 s	7.8 s	8.2 s	17.2 s
arstechnica.com	17.7 s	6.3 s	7.8 s	17.8 s
hothardware.com	35.2 s	14.7 s	11.2 s	24.4 s
pcper.com	33.3 s	15.0 s	18.0 s	34.0 s
digg.com	34.3 s	15.0 s	22.1 s	40.0 s
techreport.com	24.1 s	9.6 s	9.0 s	20.5 s
tomshardware.com	21.4 s	16.4 s	13.8 s	26.0 s
slashdot.org	26.0 s	10.0 s	20.9 s	46.0 s
facebook.com	31.7 s	13.5 s	19.6 s	37.7 s
iPhone 3GS Advantage over Palm Pre		21%
iPhone 3GS Advantage over iPhone 3G		122%

The new 3GS renders web pages 128% faster, on average, than the old iPhone 3G. The 45% clock speed boost alone isn’t enough to generate such a large performance increase, this is a new microarchitecture. Also, note that the 3GS’ performance mimics that of the Palm Pre – another Cortex A8 based phone.

Not too surprising given the just-released nature of the Pre’s webOS, the 3GS is actually able to render webpages slightly faster than the Pre in some cases. The overall performance advantage ends up being 22.6% in favor of the 3GS over the Pre.

Application launch time has also improved (I’ve updated the results with data from the iPhone OS 3.0):

Application Launch Time in Seconds	Web Browser	Dialer	Google Maps	Camera	Email
Apple iPhone 3GS	0.7 s	0.7 s	2.7 s	2.8 s	0.8 s
Apple iPhone 3G	0.8 s	1.2 s	3.3 s	3.9 s	1.2 s
Palm Pre	3.0 s	1.5 s	8.6 s	4.4 s	3.3 s
T-Mobile G1	5.4 s	2.0 s	4.4 s	4.9 s	2.0 s
iPhone 3GS vs. 3G Performance Advantage	14%	71.5%	22.2%	39.4%	50%

While the old iPhone 3G was no slouch, the 3GS is anywhere from 14 – 72% faster in basic application load times. It’s the magic of a brand new CPU architecture.

I’ll be working on the 3GS all weekend and hope to provide a more thorough look at CPU, GPU and battery life performance with the new hardware. Enjoy.

Credit – anandtech.com

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