2007 Holiday Gift Guide: Palm Centro Smartphone

Posted by John P. on November 27th, 2007 Comments Printer-Friendly

Palm Centro

There never has been a low-cost smartphone, but a few months ago Sprint and Palm partnered up and released the Centro, a step up for the younger crowd who wants to ditch the RAZR they got for free. Is it worth spending the $99 on it though? Find out after the jump.

The Centro comes in two colors, red and black, though I’m sure that a wider selection will come soon. It has a 320×320 pixel Transflective color touchscreen, which is a decent size for such a low-priced smartphone. The Centro runs Palm OS 5.4.9, and has a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back, without a flash. It has 64MB of available user storage, but the microSD card slot allows for 4GB more to be added for movies, photos, and music.

On the top is a ringer/silent switch that allows you to easily switch between vibrate and ring modes. On the front is a 5-way navigator, shortcuts to various functions of the phone, and talk/end buttons. Below that is the keyboard.

The keyboard fairly cramped compared to other smartphones. It wasn’t that hard to type on after spending a few days with the device, but it still was a little too small. The screen also has the same 3 pixel black border that other Palm smartphones seem to have, and the screen isn’t flush with the rest of the phone.

Palm Centro Using the phone was a breeze, Palm has got this down to a tee, and we hope future products will be the same or better. The Palm OS is looking a bit dated though, wouldn’t you say? For $99, it comes loaded with push-style email (like a Blackberry), EVDO for fast downloads, and instant messaging built-in. And if you need to edit Microsoft Office documents, the Centro comes with Documents To Go for editing those as well. One feature we liked was access to Sprint’s SprintTV service which allows you to watch live television programming from CNN and other large networks anywhere you go, but like the other phones with this service, video quality was poor.

Performance was nothing to hit home about, but call quality was excellent and the battery life was good. The camera quality isn’t the best, but for $99, what can you expect?

Overall, the Palm Centro is the perfect gift this holiday season for the teenager looking to ditch their phones for something with a full QWERTY keyboard, or for first-time smartphone users looking to start with something basic and not too overwhelming. It certainly won’t break the bank either.

Pros