Features

The Centro is a combination of vital hits and misses as far as features are concerned. It runs on Palm OS 5.4.9 and comes with 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM. Thanks to the backward compatibility of this OS, many applications released for previous Palm PDAs/smartphones will also work with the Centro. That’s especially useful if you already own a Palm and don’t want to give up using any of your favourite applications.

This phone has been streamlined to work with many popular applications and services. In fact, searching for freeware third-party applications is a breeze; you can easily lay your hands on the most commonly used apps for free on the Internet.

The Centro is a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) phone and supports both GPRS and EDGE, but not 3G. The voice features include services like speakerphone, three-way calling, voice dialing, speed dial, and the 'ignore with text' feature, which allows you to reply to a call with a text message if you can't or don't want to take the call. The Centro also supports text and multimedia messaging with the usual text chat view, which is quite a famous feature on the Palm OS.

Wi-Fi is lacking, which means you could miss out on an essential part of your business communication, while you are left surfing on EDGE speeds. Though Internet on EDGE is good, Wi-Fi would have been even better. The phone has integrated Bluetooth Ver 1.2 for use with wireless headsets, hands-free kits, object exchange, and dial-up networking, but misses out on the A2DP factor, which enables Bluetooth Stereo Headset use. You could thus miss out on wireless music.

Equipped with several choices to access your corporate and personal email accounts, the Centro offers more than meets the eye. The VersaMail application supports Microsoft's Direct Push Technology, which enables real-time synchronisation with Microsoft Exchange Server. VersaMail also supports a wide range of POP and IMAP e-mail accounts. We tested a Gmail account and a corporate account and were quite satisfied with the push technology; it worked well with both.

 

Email setup was easy; we used it on a Vodafone account. We tried it on a normal GPRS connection, which did not work; but it connected well with the advanced GPRS package that allows the phone to act as a modem too. As soon as the setup was complete, the detection was quick and email started arriving right away.

Multimedia and Camera

The Palm Centro comes bundled with PocketTunes Deluxe Edition, which is capable of playing MP3, WAV and DRM-protected music files. However, the in-box accessories were disappointing – all we detected was a mono headset. That said; the music quality was decent.

The Centro comes equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera with 2x zoom and video recording capabilities. However, just as with the Treo's camera, there are no options to tweak the white balance, resolution and brightness. The camera is really basic, with no settings or special effects of any kind except 2x digital zoom. Click and capture, and you are done. It does auto-adjust to low light levels, but the lack of a flash was evident. Despite all this, we were impressed with the picture quality; images were sharply defined and exhibited good colour in both natural and artificial light.