YouTube Link

The Pixi launch is on November 15th which is only one week away and Wirefly was able to get an unboxing video up pretty early. We should expect unboxings to be released all week long but a couple notable things about this particular unboxing video. We have the Facebook app included with superior integration with new features allowing you to view contacts feeds and updates in the contacts app, though this wasn't shown in the video, only discussed. The keys are as reported by many a lot more 'clicky' than the Pre's keyboard which I personally envy but I will deal with my jealousy another time. Also the gesture area now can be tapped one time to zoom in and out of card view. (I am kind hoping this gets added to the Pre's gesture area as well but that's just me). Also the speed of the OS in the video exceeds that of the more powerful Pre and it's current iteration of WebOS.

A short Pixi speed comparison to the Pre after the break...

The Pixi has a significantly slower processor and architecture but in this video it seems to run much faster and smoother than the current version of WebOS on the more powerful Palm Pre. This of course could be the placebo affect we get almost everytime there is an update which is usually just the OS running cleaner than we remember due to a restart but, we expect this to be more than that. Some app load times seemed to be much different than when compared to the Pre running WebOS 1.2.1. With the Palm Pixi the 'Phone' app took less than one second to open, the 'Contacts' app took 2.5 seconds to open and once open everthing seemed real fluid and smooth, also the 'Messaging' app took 2.4 seconds to load. I reset my Pre and opened these apps as well to test compared to the video and the phone app took 5 seconds to open, the contacts app took 4.5 seconds to open, and the messaging app took 3.2 seconds to open. That is almost at 100% reduction in time with every single app. With all the buzz of the speed increase that is supposed to be coming to WebOS in the next version and how snappy WebOS is in this unboxing video on the lower speed chip we feel pretty confident we will get some very notable speed increases.

Everything else looks about the same as we expected the Pixi to have, there isn't anything here that is too out of the norm. This just has the vibe that something new is coming and it is exciting to see what is going to be in WebOS 1.3.1 and heart warming to have all the future Pixi users join the fleet with the rest of us as WebOS owners.

On a side note - the Pixi has only one speaker but two speaker vents giving the illusion it has two speakers. So don't feel jelous Pre users we get the same sound quality!

You can check out the unboxing directly on YouTube here

You can check out full details and specifications of the Palm Pixi at Palm's website here