- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 39 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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13 out of 13 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Amazing Phone For the Price"
Pros: Inexpensive, Feature-Packed, Lightweight
Cons: Palm OS is a little buggy, micro-SD required for real storage but not included
Summary: I just got my phone a few days ago. So far, it's been very good. Here's the feature breakdown:
-- QWERTY keyboard
-- Bluetooth
-- Voice Dialing
-- Touchscreen or keypad number dialing
-- Easily accessible phone log
-- Palm OS
-- Plays streaming, DRMed, and MP3 music
The first thing to say about this phone is that the keyboard is really helpful. Not only is it good for texting, but it also really helps for entering in Web addresses and in typing memos. Yes, the keys are a little bit cramped, but seriously, it's a cell phone! It's not meant for touch-typing.
The second feature, which is much-overlooked, I think, is the Palm OS. Having Palm on your phone gives you access to thousands of applications. There are all kinds of useful things you can put on your Palm -- from document viewers to games, from calculators to e-book readers. Just have a look at all the apps you can run on a Palm device. Really, it's quite impressive all that you can do.
The Palm OS also gives you access to something else: Palm accessories. While I was disappointed to learn that my old Palm cradle (from my TX) wouldn't work with the Centro, I was delighted to learn that my infrared keyboard would. This means that I can take my Centro to meetings and take notes with it, just like I did with my old Palm. (Try that on an iPhone!) If you're a longtime Palm user and have bought a few accessories, they might just work on the Centro. (I'd check first if I was you, though, of course.)
Of course, there is some bad news. The same OS that allows you to do all this stuff is also a little bit buggy. I've encountered my share of resets along the way while experimenting with things like DocumentsToGo. And for some odd reason, the Centro cycles not once, but twice. One reboot is bad enough, but having to watch it reboot twice is a little much. (Thankfully, this reboot process probably only takes 10 seconds or so.) Also (and somewhat inexplicably) Palm hasn't seen fit to include a reset button on the phone. You have to pull out the battery to reset it. (Since the battery cover doesn't have any texture to it, this takes some effort. My advice is to push down hard towards the top of the battery cover. It's not going to break on you.)
The other downside is that you have to get a micro-SD card for the Centro. It (maybe understandably) doesn't take regular-sized SD cards. You only get 64 megs of onboard memory, so if you're upgrading from something like a Palm TX with 256MB of memory, be prepared to feel a little claustrophobic until you get that new card.
The camera is passable for a phone. Not much to complain about there. And you can take short videos without a micro-SD card in the phone. By "short", I mean I took a 10-second video and it was fine. You might be able to fit more on the onboard memory (and probably can), but I'd still wait until you had a micro-SD card, since space is at a premium.
All in all, this is a great device. I'd recommend it to anyone new to smartphones who's on a budget, and certainly for anyone who's upgrading from a previous Palm device. Some people may feel cramped by the keyboard, but for me, the only things keeping this phone from being a 10 are the somewhat buggy OS and the lack of an included memory card.Updated
It's been brought up that the BlackBerry is a much better phone. While the Blackberry Pearl does have more features, the features that it has are not necessarily crucial to all users. The Pearl gives you a more up-to-date BlueTooth (2.0 as opposed to 1.2) a slightly better camera (2MP as opposed to 1.3MP) and GPS. If those things are critical to you, then by all means, you should get a Blackberry Pearl.
On the other hand, the Centro gives you a full QWERTY keyboard (i.e., no predictive typing), thousands more apps, a better browser, and access to compatible Palm accessories. So what you get out of the box isn't really the whole story when you buy a Palm.
While the Centro probably won't win any beauty contests, you can do a lot more with the Centro than you can do with a Blackberry.Updated
I wanted to put in one more update to my review to diagnose the double-reboot problem.
What I had to do to solve all my problems was a hard reset. Here's how it goes:
1) Rename your Backup folder. (Under Vista, this is under C:\Users\<Vista Username>
Documents\Palm OS Desktop\<Palm HotsyncID>Backup)
1) Sync your Centro. (I can't emphasize this enough! All your data will be wiped out by the hard reset.)
1) Take the battery out of the phone.
2) Hold down the power button.
3) Put the battery back into the phone, still holding down the button.
4) Release the button after the second time the Palm logo comes up.
5) When prompted, press up on the 5-way navigation button to hard reset. The Centro will hard reset, wiping out the old data.
6) Start adding programs back to your Centro.
After I did that, programs like Documents to go and VersaMail, that had been crashing before, now worked fine. The problem was a system preference left over from my old Palm. Doing the hard reset and adding the programs back on wipes out the old preferences so that you can start fresh.
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