Will the unlocked Centro be a success for Palm?
June 30, 2008 – 9:24 am | by Azizi
Palm is now officially offering an unlocked GSM Centro smartphone. The Centro has been selling very well at the subsidized price of US$99 or even lower.
The full price of the unlocked Centro is US$299. Here’s what you get for your 300 bucks:
- 320×320 pixel Transflective color touchscreen, supports 16-bit color (up to 65K colors)
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE class 10 radio, quad band world phone (850/900/1800/1900MHz)
- Palm OS by ACCESS 5.4.9
- Bluetooth Version 1.2
- 64MB available user storage
- 1.3 megapixels with 2x digital zoom and video capture
- Removable 1150mAh, lithium-ion Up to 4 hours talk time, or up to 300 hours standby time
- microSD card expansion (up to 4GB supported)
The unlocked Centro is also the first Palm OS based smartphone to use a new version of Google Mobile Maps (GMM) that includes My Location. My Location uses cell phone towers to approximate your location on the map. Andrew of Treonauts has a good review of the MyLocation feature for the Centro. While this feature is great (it works very well on my iPhone), I am sure a lot of Treo owners are miffed that they can’t get My Location as well.
Due to the limitations of the Palm OS, we will probably never see a 3G version of it (at least, non-EVDO 3G). For a $300 phone, the Centro does suffer when compared to its competition. The Centro looks to be the last ever Palm OS phone from Palm — I hope Palm can really wow us with the new Nova-based smartphones coming next year.
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.