Accessories

My Little Red Companion
Coming from a T-Mobile Sidekick III to a red palm centro, I had fairly reasonable expectations from a higher-end phone and a higher-end service (sprint). Providing a little background into my service change, my friend who works at sprint hooked me up with the Sprint SERO plan, which you can google and will find multiple ways to take advantage of the plan. I pay thirty dollars a month, and I get 500 minutes, unlimited data and unlimited texting... you simply can't beat it.

Anyway, back to the phone. I ended up getting the red version; my best friend has the pink one, so I figured I should switch it up a little, and black was so normal. I was stunned when I opened the packaging and saw how small it was. This phone is truly the tiniest smartphone I have ever seen that has a QWERTY keyboard, hands down. Being a young man with rather large hands, I was afraid that the keyboard would be too small for me to tap out even the simplest text message without making multiple errors; however, after a few days of getting used to the phone, I now make no mistakes when writing even a large email.

This phone is also one of the sturdiest phones I have ever owned. Compared to my previous sidekicks,razrs, and the like of flimsy phones, I have had this phone for over two weeks, used it constantly, dropped it multiple times, and it has not one scratch on it. The casing, a shiny metallic-like plastic, is surprisingly sturdy, and none of the paint has come of at all.

Diving into the software interface of this phone, Palm's age-old operating system is on it, but I had no problems with it. Sprint included pTunes, which is a great mp3 player with an internet radio receiver, Sprint TV, which is a system of some free and some one-time cost shows and videos that you can download to your phone at lightening speed, google maps, documents to go, and text messaging that is displayed in conversations much like the iPhone.

Syncing this phone to the computer is an absolute breeze, and finding third-party apps for it is an easy task. Opera mini, an iPhone-like web browser, can be installed onto it if you find the Java Microenvironment. Another plus in having this Microenvironment is the fact that...drumroll please... it allows you to STREAM YOUTUBE VIDEOS! After downloading the Java Microenvironment, just go to m.youtube.com and off you go! This browser AND the Java Microenvironment made the phone 100% better, and it's only one of the many third party apps that I use every day.

One of the huge features of this sprint smartphone is that it has picturemail. Windows mobile phones do NOT have picture mail, making this and the Palm Treo the only smartphones that sprint offers which have this capability; a MAJOR selling point for many, including myself.

In terms of service, I get service absolutely EVERYWHERE, including in my school which has cell blockers. I often get service where people who have verizon don't get service, and when I've roamed it's been on the verizon network, so I have never had a time where service hasn't been available.

There are two things about this phone that I dislike, but not enough to dislike it any bit. One of these is the battery life. With the screen's brightness turned to the lowest it can go without shutting the baklight completely off, the most it could last without a charge is 2 days, and this is without use of the mp3 player and data. I find myself charging it every night, which isn't a big deal, but for some people I'm sure this would be a hassle. The other negative feature about this phone is the fact that the batter cover has to be removed in order for you to be able to remove your microSD card. For those who swap memory cards, this could get old very quickly, but I've gotten used to it.

All in all, this is basically a smaller version of the popular, and much more expensive, palm treo. I would recommend this phone and the sprint SERO plan to everyone, hands down.

I am Loving The Centro
Called Sprint, Told them, either give me a new phone, not just the 75.00 credit or I'm going to AT&T, Ive been a customer over 3 yrs and think I was due a new phone... She told me she would send me a Centro overnight shipping, so I figured, well, better than this dinosaur I have plus to be honest I love being Sprints customer, incoming minutes plans are the best... The Centro is amazing, easy to use, sooo many features and crystal clear sound and screen.... two thumbs up!

A powerful, cheap, easy-to-use powerhouse!
Many have made disparaging comments in the past about where Palm has been heading in the past few years, and how little Palm has innovated. This is all true, but it doesn't detract from the great value the Centro represents right now. For a paltry $99 (as a direct-buy from Sprint), you get great yet simple-to-use contact manager, calendar, to-do apps, an easy to use phone interface (integrated with the contact manager) which can be customized to select oft-chosen numbers with single keypresses, dirt-simple camera and camcorder functionality, multiple email client support (including HotMail and Yahoo), dirt-simple MP3 music playing (with Windows Media Player synchronization), true web-browsing (at least compared to the limited WAP browsing you get from disposable phones), etc, etc. Plus you gain access to thousands of free and commercial applications which are surprisingly powerful considering the age of the underlying operating system. I use a program called HandyShopper for maintaining multiple shopping lists, and I couldn't live without it. iSecure is a free and easy-to-use program for storing passwords in an iron-strong (i.e., heavily encrypted) database. By nature of the Palm OS, the vast majority of applications for the Palm are easy to use; this is an advantage which too many critics overlook.

The Palm OS has some limitations (e.g., the limited multitasking in some scenarios can be problematic for some users), but Palm has set up the Centro so you can listen to MP3s or talk on the phone while performing other tasks, so this alleviates my biggest gripes in this regard.

I've only had my Centro for a few days, but I'm impressed by the screen clarity, the speed at application switching, the battery life, and, of course, the breadth of the included applications (including a limited edition of Documents To Go). (Disclaimer: I can't activate my Internet or email package for a few weeks since it would incur overlapping service charges, but the browser supports Google Maps and YouTube so I suspect the browsing experience will be rather good. Sprint's EvDO network is blazing fast, too! Although the Centro doesn't support WiFi, this should be considered a PLUS since WiFi is NOT secure, despite what you may have heard; any moron with a laptop, a WiFi card and any of the freely available sniffer applications can capture your SSL handshake authentication information when you connect to your bank while sitting comfortably in an airport lounge...)

As to stability, I have not had to reset my Centro yet (but time will tell). UPDATE: I found an instance where opening a file with an older version of an application caused a reset, but updating the application corrected this, and I lost no information.

Another thing that really impressed me is that I bought this phone as an upgrade to a 6 year old Samsung Palm-compatible PDA. I expected application compatibility to be strong (it was), but I didn't expect the migration of my old HotSync back-up to the new phone to be painless. It was. Despite having an older version of the Palm Desktop and applications that only run under Palm OS 3.5 or earlier, all of my installed applications came over without any effort on my part and (except for a trial version of PacMan) ran without a glitch!

My only major complaint of the Centro is the cramped keyboard. If you have short fingernails, the keyboard isn't for you. Fortunately, the on-screen keyboard is still available and lets me enter information fairly quickly.

If you are a Palm fanatic and are looking at upgrading, the Centro is a must-have, especially if you have a large collection of Palm apps and don't wish to re-enter all that information!

As nice as it is, the Palm OS will never compete with the iPhone's interface, but the Centro isn't $400 either. Plus, you can buy a spare battery for the Centro and replace it on a plane - try that, iPhone!!!

Addendum: I discovered a neat feature my old Samsung didn't have: If a number of events occur and you can't respond to them (e.g., you're away from your phone), when you turn on the display you're presented with a summary screen. For example, I recently turned on the display and was informed (on a single screen) that I missed two appointments (details shown), two phone calls (names shown), and that I had a voicemail message waiting for me! It's like having a personal secretary!

Same-Old, Same-Old. Treo 600, I mean Centro....
I like the Treo Centro. It runs on the very dependable Sprint CDMA/EV-DO network. But it is the same phone as the Treo 600 that came out back in 2003. Palm decided that since the 600 was such a big success, that they had no need to make any kind of effort in designing a new phone. This holds true with the Centro. This phone has the (((SAME))) hardware as the Treo 600, 650, 700, 750, ect. Just a bit more memory and a so-called updated OS. The OS might have an update number of 5.4.9, but there is zero difference in the OS. I can not tell a difference at all. This is sad seeing as they made a Lunix based OS called Cobalt years ago and it has never seen the light of day.
The Centro still has the same bugs as every Treo since the 600. Start-up time is very slow. Which is really bad when you are in need of making an important phone call, and the phone resets for no reason. Making you wait up to 60+ seconds for it to come back online. The limited RAM of 64MB's, is so much lower then most PDA's currently on the market. You can use ZLaucher to transfer programs to a memory card, but this can not be done with all software. And since the web browser uses RAM, not memory cards, you still only have 8MB's to work with in Blazer. All software must be loaded into RAM before being it can run, So prepare for the phone to reset at least once a day to get the those limited RAM resources back.
Still no WiFi, which was the complaint in 2003 and Palm has not added it yet. The Centro still has the same 312 MHz Intel XScale processor. Signal strength is still pretty strong, but voice quality is still not great when compared to every other phone I have used before.

Sprint is marketing this as an affordable PDA at $99 with a contract. But when you know that the hardware is going on 5 years old, price really doesn't make current PDA owners care a whole lot. I bought the Centro because I hated my Motorola RAZR 2 and I needed to get something better. But after using the Centro for over a month now, I see no difference what-so-ever in this PDA and the Treo 600 and 650 that I owned a few years ago. Smaller packaging, but the same phone. The Centro is a good example of what a PDA maker SHOULD NOT DO. While Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, HTC, ect have all updated their lineups with powerful PDA's, Palm has sat idly by doing nothing with their forum star power. Palm used to control a huge chuck of the PDA software market, but now Microsoft has caught up and passed PalmOS by. No new companies have used PalmOS. Let me rephrase that, NO ONE is using the PalmOS anymore; except for Palm.
So if you don't have a PDA and want an affordable one, then the Centro might be for you. If you want power, then Sprint has much better PDA's then the aged and milked-to-death Treo's.
More then likely the Centro will be the last PDA-Phone ever made by Palm. They have lost crazy amounts of market share and have been laying off employees. So who knows, maybe the Centro will be a collectors item. A PDA that has never evolved, never been fixed, never been changed in any, meaningful way.Treo