Palm Pixi Defines the Ultimate Petite Smartphone

I can only imagine how many Palm Pixis will be lost shortly after purchase once Palm's tiny slim smartphone goes on sale in mid November.

I mean, come on, how easy will it be to leave this sleek gadget in a pants pocket, or have it get wedged between business cards or credit cards and then slip away unnoticed.

But, darn, it is pretty neat, and it sure promises to be a lot of fun. And the price point isn't too bad, either, as Sprint will be offering it at under $100 with a two-year data commitment. It'll also be available at Best Buy and even Wal-Mart (which has, in the past, even lowered prices on handy gadgets like this).

According to the official Palm Blog, it's Palm's thinnest phone ever and features a creative multi-touch screen that uses natural hand and finger gestures for navigation. Users can have more than one application open and flip back and forth without having to close one out or lose their place thanks to Palm's latest OS, the webOS platform.

For the social network crowd, the ability to put contact data pulled from pretty much everywhere else (think Facebook, Outlook, LinkedIn) and keep it in one single entry in a list, is pretty compelling. The instant messaging aspect is just as open, as users can add contacts from AIM, Yahoo! Messenger or Google Talk.

But maybe the best feature is that if and when you lose it — and I'm thinking that's likely in my case, given that I can't keep my typical-size cell phone for too long — you won't lose all that great data you've pulled together, as Palm backs up the data in a cloud service.

And after Microsoft's recent snafu with the T-Mobile Sidekick debacle (where users lost everything they had stored on that smartphone device), it's a pretty safe bet Palm will make sure it doesn't land in a similar predicament.

Nope, the only thing this snazzy, reasonably priced smartphone needs is a GPS location element for when it slips out my back pocket during a walk, or lands in the garbage pile when I clean out the handbag now and then.

Photo courtesy of Palm