gdgt

The Palm Pixi and the Palm Pre are not bad phones, functionally they work great. WebOS is actually a very nice interface and all the features of the phones are very nice. My main problem with the phones was they seemed cheaply made, the plastics in them made them feel cheap, and the phone would pop and crack as the plastics moved while you were using the keyboard, with that said, they still worked very well, and even thou, they seemed cheap, no matter how many times I dropped it, it still never broke, so it was still quite durable.

Also the ecosystem of the phone is well below what most people are used to when compared to iPhone, Android or even WP7, but For what your using it for, I'd say go for it, with such a cheap price for a decent smartphone, it defiantly wouldn't be a wrong decision.

Technically, it's a fair device - the original Pixi is on the slow side - but it's an unbelievable deal at that price. However, I would caution you to audition it carefully live for at least 20 minutes, because everything about the phone is small - form factor, keyboard, and most of all, the display. webOS is a fantastic OS, but it needs room to breathe - you want to be able to have a bunch of cards open and flick between them. It's hard to do when you can't see what's on those cards because the resolution is chopped off vertically and the text is tiny. Then it gets worse when you get any sort of notification, which further shrinks the rest of whatever is onscreen. Personally, I find the Pixi and Veer 4G unusable without squinting, but YMMV, so try it live somewhere before pulling the trigger.