Highlights of a review of the Pixi from NY Times:

Twenty-five bucks for an app phone? That’s unbelievable. (Or, rather, it emphasizes how irrelevant a phone’s starter price really is. The true cost is embedded in your two years of monthly service fees–in this case, $2,309.)

Anyway, the Pixi is absolutely gorgeous, with a razor-thin (OK, .4-inch-thin) design. The front is flat glossy black; the back is curved hard rubber. It weighs just over 3 ounces. THREE OUNCES!? That’s insane. If this phone were any smaller and lighter, it would cease to exist.

This time, the illuminated keyboard doesn’t slide out—it’s always there beneath the screen; the phone is a slab design. The keyboard is very tiny indeed (just over two inches wide), but because the keys are super-raised and rubberized and move and click when you type on them, it’s not bad. You wind up supplementing each press with your thumbnail, and it works.

The operating system is the same fluid WebOS you can read about in my Pre review here. Once again, it integrates contacts, e-mail and calendars from all online sources—Google, Yahoo, Exchange and so on—and merges them on the phone.

However, on the Pixi, almost everything from the Pre has been diminished. The most painful change is the screen, which is only 320 by 400 pixels; that is, it shows 17 percent less, vertically, and you really miss those extra 80 pixels. You feel a little cramped.

The camera is 2 megapixels, down from 3. The battery life is shorter. The speaker is quieter. You can’t open as many apps at once.

There’s no Wi-Fi, either, so your only connection to the Internet is over Sprint’s cellular airwaves; cellular connections are generally slower than Wi-Fi ones. (Then again, I’ve found Sprint’s Internet coverage to be excellent.)

Worst of all, the cheaper, slower processor in the Pixi makes it slow to open apps, load Web pages and trigger functions. Sometimes it gets ridiculous; you might wait a whole minute for a Web page, for example.