Thread: Palm Centro Mobile Phone

After the recent launches of some powerful Windows Mobile phones like the HTC TyTN II, and the i-mate Ultimate series, it's Palm that is again wooing business phone lovers with its Palm as. The latest offering from the company's portfolio, the Centro, runs on the company's own operating system, which is considered to be faster than Windows Mobile platform. And its not just the powerful operating system, the phone also has trendy looks. Regular business mobiles with QWERTY keypad are large and bulky. However, this handset with 18.6 mm thickness and 56.5mm width fits easily in one's hand and is lighter than the other phones in this category.

The most attractive aspect is its white colour, which is rarely seen in the handsets of this segment. Enhancing the white effect are the call accessing keys, dedicated keys and the D-pad that are done in sil¬ver and placed just below the display. The QWERTY keypad is a bit difficult to use as the keys are small and tightly placed. Since dedicated keys for calling, messaging, calendar and menu have been added to the front panel around the D-pad, no shortcut keys are on the sides edges of the device. After the Treo 750, which was running on Windows Mobile platfrom, the Centro is based on the company's own operating system. Enterprise device users might just thank Palm for this. Running on Palm as, this handset has a similar interface, which was earlier seen in the Treo 680. Apart from this one can access the menu by using the home key, which can be used as multi usage key for aborting all the running applications.

The handset picked up GPRS settings automatically and surfing the Internet was a pleasant experience. On the messaging front it supports push mail for an Outlook account and apart from this up to eight personal e-mail clients can be configured on this device. A welcome feature added to it is selecting the time and days for receiving mails. For instance, we could choose to receive mails only between Monday to Saturday during our working hours and believe us it was a great relief!

As the phone comes loaded with complete office suite, we were not only able to create new documents but were able to download and edit them in different formats such as word, excel, power point and text as well. However, Zip app, which is becoming increasingly popular among phones of this segment, was missing. Being a touchscreen, we were disappointed by the absence of handwriting recognition. However, all the apps that came pre-installed ran quickly and unlike many Windows Mobiles phones it did not hang.



Although it is an enterprise device, it easily qualifies for being a multimedia phone. The sound quality is at par with that of the music phones from Nokia's Xpress series but it can't compete with Sony Ericsson's Walkman series. We were surprised to see the l.3-megapixel camera as in this price segment we expect a bit more. The camera offers decent image quality and supports the business card scanner feature. The battery life was good as a single charge easily lasted a day with an hour of talktime and constant emailing.