My Pixel 10 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro take amazing pictures (and perhaps it’s not always best to buy the latest flagship). But they’re almost too good. The photos they take are heavily processed to ensure impeccable clarity, the colors are boosted to extreme levels, and there’s even simulated background blur if you use portrait mode. I’m tired of perfection. So I dug out a very old phone with a terrible camera — my old Palm Pixi — and took some photos. And you know what? I’m in love with the photos it takes, in all their 2MP glory. The photos have a level of emotion and nostalgia that you just don’t get on modern flagships.
The Palm Pixi
No one bought this thing for the camera
A brief history of the Palm Pixi: it was released in 2009 as the second device to run Palm’s WebOS, a year before HP bought Palm as they tried to enter the mobile industry, only to later shut it down in 2011 (and focus exclusively on PCs). The Pixi was released as a small, tossable QWERTY phone that offered WebOS’ “just type” homescreen experience with app management that presented apps as a row of cards on your homescreen above a small dock with just four shortcuts.
WebOS was a refreshing break from iPhone OS and Android, offering a lighter-weight and productivity-focused OS. As a Sprint exclusive, the Pixi lacked Wi-Fi in its first version and had a tiny 2.63″ display with 400×320 resolution. It had a poky 600MHz Qualcomm processor, with a microscopic 256MB of RAM. People loved the Pixi’s clicky and satisfying hardware keyboard. I remember being able to type extremely fast on the Pixi’s keyboard with just a little bit of practice.
Maximum resolution was barely 2MP
The camera hardware was very weak
The camera had a maximum resolution of just 2MP (that’s 1600×1200 pixels) for stills, and HVGA (480×320 pixels) for video. That’s very different from the 200MP sensors that can record 8K video on some flagships today.
The Pixi had no autofocus like today’s cameras, including no ability to tap-to-focus, which, as you’ll see in the samples, made for some pretty out-of-focus photos with a lot of noise and grain. The tiny f/2.4 sensor could barely capture enough light and, so, the LED flash would often go off, causing the entire scene to be blown out (modern phones have a flash but almost never fire it because today’s sensors have gotten so good with low light that the flash is a last resort that often never is needed).
I stopped using the stock camera app because this one is so much better
Your phone’s camera isn’t the problem—it’s the app.
But the photos had character and emotion
Here are some samples from the Pixi
Photos taken with a $1000 flagship lack character and emotion — they are over-processed, over-sharpened, and are usually void of emotion. But photos taken with my old Palm Pixi have an authenticity that is amazing and frankly charming. Sure, they’re sometimes out of focus and dim, and the colors are dull, but they tell a story and have an allure that makes me feel something. I encourage you to click through the above gallery to see what I mean.
Photos taken with a $1000 flagship lack character and emotion — they are over-processed, over-sharpened, and usually are void of emotion.
The camera was slow
And required intention to take photos
Shutter lag was a major problem with older phones, and the Pixi was no exception. Taking a photo took a lot of intention, because the time it took the Pixi to take a photo from the time you hit the shutter button was several seconds (not like the near-instant shutters of today’s phones). Because of low shutter speed, if your subject was moving at all, the resulting photo would be a huge blur, so you had to only take photos of stationary subjects. This required you to slow down, compose your photo carefully (don’t forget the rule of thirds), and take pictures with intention.
Before AI and super-powered phones, photography was more authentic
Don’t get me wrong — today’s flagships take incredible photos that are almost more vibrant than real life. But that’s the problem: the pictures that come from $1000 phones are not exactly authentic. They don’t capture the emotion of the moment. I’m not saying that we should regularly use 16-year-old phones to take pictures in 2026, but after taking a bunch of photos with my old Pixi, what was revealed to me in the photos it took were authentic colors, a level of character and authenticity that today’s flagships just cannot offer, and even a feeling of nostalgia that brought me back to a time when things were more simple.
And I’m not the only one: people are buying and using cheap disposable cameras and going back to 35mm film cameras in an effort to go back to a time when cameras would capture a momentary feeling and not just a scene recreated by computational photography.
