Palm smartphone from TCL is probably budget model

TCL’s upcoming Palm smartphone has been certified by regulator FCC and the WiFi Alliance. Many details are not yet known, but the device only appears to support WiFi on 2.4GHz. That probably makes it a budget model.

The device is listed as PVG100 with the FCC and the WiFi Alliance, Android Police discovered. Little can be concluded from the publicly available documents, for example it is not clear whether it concerns a device with a physical keyboard. It is visible, however, that there is only support for WiFi on 2.4GHz, which means that it is virtually impossible that it is a high-end device.

Support for 5GHz WiFi is common on modern smartphones in the mid-range and high price range. It is unlikely that TCL will release a high-end device that only supports WiFi at 2.4GHz. The BlackBerry devices that the manufacturer has released in recent years do support WiFi at 5GHz, even relatively cheap models such as the DTEK50. That device had an introductory price of 339 euros.

The Palm phone will run Android 8.1 Oreo. According to previous rumors, the device will be released at the end of this year. Since TCL has now received the necessary certifications from the FCC and WiFi Alliance, a release is possible in the coming months.

Palm had success in the early years of this century with its PDAs and smartphones that ran on Palm OS. Sales then declined, after which the company was bought by HP in 2010. In 2014, HP sold the Palm brand name to TCL. Last year in August, TCL announced that it would again release products with the Palm brand name. TCL has been releasing BlackBerry smartphones in Europe for some time now.