Pros: Small size, good call quality and battery life, lots of Palm apps to install
Cons: Palm UI is a little dated, not as user friendly as some other smartphones
The Bottom Line: As a first smartphone or a casual user, I highly recommend it. If you are a power user, looking for the latest and greatest, you'll probably want more.
Before i get started, I want to emphasize that this is the first smartphone I've ever owned. I've owned many regular "dumb" phones in the past, mostly Nokia, so I may miss addressing some crucial features/comparisons that smartphone power-users may look for. This review is more or less intended for newcomers to the smartphone market, like myself, and if you're thinking about jumping into a smartphone, this review is for you! What attracted me to this phone was the small size, full QWERTY keyboard, my familiarity with the Palm OS, and most importantly, price: It was $49 at Best Buy with a 2 year contract extension, no rebate, and no forcing you to sign up for a data plan. Anyway, onto the good stuff.
Like most of my reviews, I start off with the basic features on the item I'm reviewing, especially the ones I find most useful, so here they are: - Nice 320x320 16bit touchscreen display - 1.3 MP camera - GSM 850/900/1800/1900 quad band with GPRS/EDGE (sorry no 3G/UTMS) - Bluetooth 1.2 - full QWERTY keyboard - Palm OS 5.4.9 - Dedicated call/end buttons - IR (infrared) port - Comes with A/C charger and USB sync cable (no dock) - Nice loud/clear speaker for speaker phone and other audio applications - 64MB internal memory and expandable microSD slot (up to 4GB) - 4.22", Width: 2.11", Depth: 0.73", nice small package, not much bigger than your typical "dumb" phone, but maybe a little thick
I'm a gadget freak and always read up on smartphones, so it's been long overdue that I purchased a smartphone. I've owned Palms in the past, but never used them to their full potential, but that being said, I am somewhat familiar with their OS. I will admit I probably don't need every single last feature a Palm smartphone has to offer, but I found myself using the rudimentary PIM features (calendar, alarm, notes, contact list, etc...) of my Nokia 6126 a lot and really wished I had a full keyboard to do some of my daily tasks so that was a good enough reason for me to start considering a smartphone. I was a little hesitant at first because, afterall, Palm is/was a company that makes PIM devices and only in the recent years added the phone part to their devices. I was afraid they would sacrifice or work around some of the typical "phone only" features just to make it work with the PIM features. My buddy works at Palm and he assured me, the Centro, being the 4th or 5th incantation of the Palm/Phone devices (Treo 6xx and 7xx being its predecesors), they have hammered out almost all the bugs and the Centro is the most stable one yet. So in summary, most of my fears were quelled as this device, IMO, is a very nice marriage between phone and organizer.
Phone First and foremost, this will still be my cell phone and I want all the conveniences a regular cell phone has to offer. What I liked most about the phone is that the phone functions are nicely isolated from the rest of the device. You could concievably only use the phone portion with ZERO knowledge of the Palm OS. All you do is press the phone button, and you are at the phone screen. You can even set a customized wallpaper for the phone which is a simple but very obvious personalization aspect of any phone. Note, the wallpaper is ONLY for the phone function, you will not see the wallpaper when you get into the Palm OS function/screen. The only couple points of integration that I can think of between phone and PALM OS are a) the phone book/contacts list and b) sound settings (ringtones, volume, etc) Other than that the phone is very straightforward to use, including viewing missed calls, redialing, speed dial, and most other basic "dumbphone" featuers you can think of. It even has a dedicated volume rocker on the side as well as dedicated call and end buttons.
Build Quality The size was a definite plus to me. It may be a little larger and thicker than the Blackberry Pearl but it has a full QWERTY keyboard which was a requirement for me. Also, it feels very sturdy. The thickness probably has something to do with that. However, I will admit, I do wish it was just a tad thinner. Back to the the QWERTY keyboard, it's great! It may be kind of small looking at first, but it is surprisingly useable. Fortunately, I don't have huge fingers so that might be a factor of why it's good to me, but the raised buttons and practical use of the option and alt keys make it very easy to use, for letters, numbers, and symbols. The only thing I wish is that the keys weren't so slick. If your fingers are a little oily or sweaty, it may prove to be a slight obstacle. The screen is decent, and at 320x320 it is very sharp. The 16bit color also helps make it look nice. And don't forget touchscreen! Many smartphones of this size don't have a touchscreen. Granted a touchscreen isn't absolutely necessary, it does make certain things easier to access and it gives applications a lot more flexibility.
Bluetooth This feature ties in with the phone aspect as well, but has lots of use for the organizer aspect too. First of all, the bluetooth implementation for the phone isn't that great. Sure, it works, you can carry out conversations with a bluetooth headset, but unfortunately, you cannot give voice commands over the bluetooth headset, at least not with the built in bluetooth functionality, you may be able to install programs to get around this, but I haven't investigated it much myself. That is probably the biggest peeve I have about bluetooth (and maybe about the phone in general). However, aside from bluetooth handsfree, you can do just about everything else: HotSync over bluetooth, transfer files over bluetooth, connect a GPS receiver over bluetooth, and use the phone as a dial up modem for your computer. The only thing I'm not sure about is if it support bluetooth stereo headsets as I don't listen to music with this phone (I have an iPod for that) but if I were to guess, probably not.
Basic PIM/Organizer functions If you are familiar is Palm OS, eveything will feel natural to you. Same old calendar, notes, memos, calculator, alarm, reminders etc. They may be a bit dated but functional nevertheless. This is the area that I use the most. As expected it easily syncs with Palm Desktop. I'm not 100% sure about Outlook integration, but there has to be something out there for it. I unfortunately didn't use the e-mail and web functions extensively, as I alluded to earlier, I don't have a data plan, but they get the job done and if you don't like the built in e-mail/web programs, the great thing about Palm OS is that it's been around "forever" and you should have no problems finding a program that suits you. More on programs next.
3rd Party Programs This next section is mainly to inform people who haven't used the Palm OS much or at all. Since Palms have been around for YEARS, you can literally find thousands of Palm applications out there. If you feel that the built in features of this device is lacking in any way, chances are, you can find a program out there to install to fill in the holes. I find this to be the biggest advantage of the Palm OS, and probably any half decent smartphone platform for that matter. The Palm OS (or POS as some call it :D) may not be pretty and it may be a bit dated, but functionally speaking, it's hard to beat. While it does come with some potentially useful office/entertainment programs like Microsoft document viewers, pTunes (music player), Instant Messaging, and the Palm de facto Blazer web browser, you are in no way limited to using only those programs. For example, I've always wanted to play my NES roms on the go.... now I can and the emulator was a breeze to install. Again, the UI is kind of ugly and clunky (i.e. not so user friendly), but it just works.... and that is my main point of the Palm OS and applications it supports.
Other Miscellaneous comments Here are a few other short comments I think are worth mentioning
Call quality I come from Nokia phones and generally speaking, they are usually top notch when it comes to RF and call quality. I feel the Centro is definitely up to par with the good Nokia experience I've had in the past.
Shortcuts There is a very handy feature/program that allows you to assign shortcuts to ANY key, yes any key, on the QWERTY keyboard, that is a lot of shortcuts! After you program it, you can just hold down the key for a second or so and it will perform the shortcut. The shortcut can be a speed dial, opening up a particular application, opening up a web link, or sending out a message to a predefined list of contacts.
Battey Life I've only had it for a week, but so far, I'm quite impressed with it. After the 1st charge, I had it on and doing massive amount of bluetooth data transfers as well as all sorts of initial setup type work, including just playing and probing all the features. This drained the battery down to roughly 50%. But what really surprised me is that later, I probably made a total of 1.5 hours of phone calls and I still had around 25% of battery left, nowhere near empty. If you use this as a guideline, the reported 3.0 hours of talk time is reasonable, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get more. Adjusting the backlight to lower will probably give you better battery and setting the default timeout to 30sec will help as well, I did both. Which brings up another point is that there are lots of tweaks you can do to help maximize battery life, even with the built in power functions. And again, you can install more advanced power management programs to help power saving even further if you wish. For a typical user, I would say you can easily go 2 days on a full charge.
Camera Not bad.... the 1.3MP camera is definitely better than the 1.3MP on my Nokia 6126, but that's not saying much either. As with most cell phone built in cameras, you shouldn't expect much. Though this might be SLIGHTLY above average compared to all the ones I've used in the past.
microSD Expansion Slot You unfortunately have to remove the battery cover to insert and remove it. But fortunately, you don't have to remove the battery itself to do so. There are also programs out there that can make the microSD card on the Palm look like a regular flash thunbdrive in Windows so you don't actually have to remove it from the Centro to read/write files onto it. Which again proves the versatility of the Palm OS. It's probably not for the beginner user, but the option is there nonetheless.
Stylus The stylus sucks.... period. If they made toothpicks in the size of the stylus, it would be more sturdy and a better alternative to this awful piece of plastic. It's very flimsy and you can feel it flex as you press on the touchscreen. Good thing is that most basic features of the phone can be accessed via the 5 way navigation control. And most touchscreen UI buttons can be accessed by touching the screen with your finger. There are a few things that may need the touch precision of a stylus, but so far, I've found that at least 90% of the time, I don't need it.
Silent/Vibrate Though this is a very small feature of the phone, but I find it great. There is a dedicated, physical switch on the top of the phone to put it in silent/vibrate mode. Great for meetings, movies, and other times when you need to be quiet, you don't even need to look at your phone to activate/deactivate it. This in a way helps the lack of sound "profiles" that you usually get with a dumbphone. But once again, you can download and install program to also get the "profile" feature.
Conclusion My first foray into the smartphone world has been a pleasant one with the Palm Centro. I believe it has a lot to do with the fact I've used Palms in the past and have a general understanding of how they work. However, I have to admit that even if I didn't, I probably would still think fairly highly of it since like I said before, the phone really needs no knowledge of the Palm OS to use. The basic built in apps are simple enough to navigate to send texts, take pictures/videos, check e-mail, and browse the web. One downside is that they might not be as user friendly as some of the more recent smartphone innovations (iPhone definitely comes into mind). And the best part, if you're attuned to the Palm OS, this device has endless possibilities with all the apps out there waiting to be installed. And finally, it was only $50 with a 2 year contract extension at Best Buy... no rebates to deal with either!
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