Review: A Smartphone Newbie Takes on the Palm Centro

Posted by: weiganla on May 03 2008

This is kind of embarrassing. Here I am, a writer for a mobile website who’s been covering all the latest news about smartphones for months, and, um, I’ve never actually used one. Well, maybe not never — I did pry a friend’s Mogul away from him for about three minutes once. Does that count? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

On top of trying to wrap my head around the concept of a PDA and phone in the same device, I get hit with the Palm OS. I haven’t touched a Palm since the m100 I got back in the year 2000, and that’s been gathering a lot of dust since I realized that it lost all my data every time I replaced its batteries — and considering how the dratted thing devoured AAs, that got annoying fast. (A couple of years back I was actually a member of a class-action suit against Palm to make them fix it. We won.)

So maybe I’m completely unqualified to write this review. On the other hand, as a smartphone neophyte I happen to be exactly the Palm Centro’s target audience. The Centro is designed as a step up from feature phones like my old Samsung m500, with basic, easy-to-use applications like web, texting, email, contacts/calendar/tasks, and media player. It also makes phone calls.

Unfortunately Palm’s PR department only gave me three weeks to play with this AT&T-branded Centro, and then I had to box up the cute little guy and send him back. The Centro arrived on my doorstep literally hours before I got on a plane to Chicago, and using it as my primary device on a trip turned out to be a perfect way for us to get acquainted. I thought I would miss the convenience of a converged device, but then Sprint Retentions stepped in and I didn’t have to.

For the rest of the review, buckle up and hit the jump!

A Look At the Centro

Treos have their fans, but thanks to the virtual lack of any updates to their form factor since the first one hit the market, they’re some of the clunkiest smartphones out there. The Centro, on the other hand, is more or less adorable with its happy rounded corners and clean lines. While it could be thinner, it still packs a punch in a compact package. AT&T offers Obsidian and Glacier White colors, while Sprint gives a choice of Onyx, Ruby, or Pink (which is feeling left out because it doesn’t get a cool name).

  

The Centro and a Treo 755p

Design

Overall, the Centro sits comfortably in a hand, with controls well-placed. It’s got utility, but for Palm that is nothing new. What’s more significant is the significantly updated styling. The streamlined Centro is the best-looking Palm phone ever. While that may not be saying a lot, the fresh and uncomplicated form probably does as much to reassure prospective upgraders to the smartphone world as Palm’s user-friendly reputation. On top of that, forget the psychology: it’s cute!

All right, the keypad. When you make a compact device and decide you need to put a QWERTY on it, the keys have to be small. I get that. But those things are tiny. I learned how to hit them with the tips of my thumbnails and managed speed and accuracy as good as on any mobile input method I’ve tried, but trying to use the pads of your fingers would be a very quick way to go crazy. I couldn’t manage without my nails, and while I don’t have dainty girly fingers, they’re not sausages either — so if you’re considering a Centro, I’d strongly suggest spending a couple of seconds with the keyboard before you shell out any money. On the plus side, the keypad’s organization makes it impressively quick to switch between letters, capitals, numbers, and special characters.

Getting Up and Running

General operation is a snap. Once the SIM card and battery are in, you’re ready to go. I am going to try very hard to keep the next sections from turning into a full-blown dissection of the Palm OS, because otherwise this review might end up being long.

Palm built in a couple of essential, handy basic features. There’s a keyguard that activates automatically, a conveniently located "mute" slider, and what amounts to a flight mode where the phone is turned off but the rest of the Centro’s functions can be used.

The screen is small, but at 320×320 it is sharp and the colors are bright. In fact, it has the same resolution as the Treo’s screen compressed into a slightly smaller area, so edges really pop.

Ironically, interacting with the Centro and its relatively ancient operating system is a little bit like using an iPhone. There’s no handy Today screen; home base is a program list. You don’t close programs, you just navigate somewhere else and the OS saves your place and flicks the application off (unfortunately, this means no multitasking). Operation is so smooth, the concept of programs that need to be spooled up and shut down practically stops existing. Load times were snappy, and if a lot of the included programs are bare-bones, the speed gain would be worth the sacrifice to most users. You can shut down the screen from anywhere, and the device will wake back up where it left off without complaining (or crashing). Forget registry tweaks, there’s not even a file explorer — and honestly, I haven’t missed it. Almost everything most people need is on the surface.

Phone and Communication

Call quality is clear on both the sending and receiving ends, and reception was good everywhere I tested it (although I sadly didn’t get a chance to try inside an elevator). On the software side, the Phone program is better-looking on the AT&T version than the Sprint one, including attractive tabs for a home screen, dialpad, contacts, and more. Sprint’s Centro simply has a home screen with a plain shortcuts bar. A nice array of customization options let you choose how Phone behaves, such as automatically searching Contacts when you dial or locking the touchscreen when a call is in progress. Phone is also well-integrated into all the other communications programs, and things like speakerphone and conferencing are refreshingly easy to access.

Speaking of the other communications programs, Palm’s terrific threaded SMS application organizes messages by contact, not just by time received, to keep conversations together. An IM program that works with AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! is also built in.

Email

Having two separate email programs included must have seemed like a good idea to someone — probably whoever struck the licensing deal. VersaMail is targeted toward consumer accounts like AOL and Gmail. I’ve tested it with my Gmail account, and while I’ve had a few issues with message bodies that mysteriously won’t download, it’s a quick way to check for new mail. (Mobile Gmail is more powerful and works great on the Centro’s browser.) Xpress Mail also handles Exchange servers and supports push capability, although I haven’t been able to test this personally.

Web

The Centro runs Blazer, Palm’s antiquated browser that practically emits audible creaks. It’s also totally incapable of rendering anything other than designed-for-mobile pages. Blazer is adequate for basic use like checking news and sports, and before the iPhone’s Safari browser proved that full mobile surfing didn’t have to be limited to PhDs, that might have been okay. No one will ever mistake Blazer for Safari.

This is as good a place as any to mention that the Centro does not have WiFi. Frankly, with my unlimited data plan I haven’t missed it. The iPhone needs WiFi because it handles a lot of graphics, but the Centro just can’t do that kind of heavy lifting. Plus, getting WiFi to work can be a major headache. It may be trendy to blast a gadget for not having all of the latest tech abilities, but given how Blazer is, Palm has traded a small potential gain in power and a lot of extra complexity for keeping things simple. With unlimited data, the lack of WiFi by itself is not a drawback.

Media

The 1.3 megapixel camera may not set the photography world on fire, but it gets the job done both as a camera and camcorder. Both the Camera application and the Pictures & Video organizer are intuitive, effective, and designed to make sharing images as painless as possible.

Considering that the Centro only has 64 MB of onboard storage space, it’s not much use as a media player without an expansion card. It comes with a microSD slot, but it’s up to you to find something to put in it. The included music player, Pocket Tunes (which used to be a popular paid program), can sort through songs by artist, album, or genre, and it supports playlists. PC users of the AT&T Centro get to sync with Windows Media Player, and Mac users get the shaft — their only way to transfer music is a microSD card.

Organizer

Way back when Palm started out, pretty much all their devices did was keep personal information. Palm has had plenty of time to get things right, and the organizer functions on the Centro are obviously a product of years of evolution. While Calendar, Tasks, Memo, and Contacts don’t have the frills of some of the newer personal applications, like user-defined pictures for everything, uber-fancy graphics, and retinal scanning, the Centro’s organizer tools are stable, fast, and functional. A relatively new, and very welcome, update is the addition of an "agenda" view in Calendar that displays appointments, tasks, and an email counter over a user-defined wallpaper.

Other Programs

The Centro comes loaded with a surprisingly tasty smorgasbord of extra programs. I’m not talking about the proprietary carrier junk, which unfortunately is there too. Programs like Google Maps, Documents To Go, and, yeah, Astraware Solitaire do a lot to improve the user experience. Docs2Go deserves special mention for handling Microsoft documents better than Microsoft’s own Pocket Office suite, with solid editing and synchronizing capabilities — it even views PDFs.

Conclusion

They say good things come in small packages. Comparing the Centro to the Treo line, that’s a tough point to argue. The Centro keeps all of the best features of Palm’s previous phones while getting a slimming makeover in both size and price. There are better smartphones out there — Windows Mobile has more power and the iPhone has more sex appeal. Still, the Centro has a fairly impressive list of talents and is easy enough for my mom to use (literally — I made her try it). And it’s cute! Throw in the $99 price tag, and the little Centro looks like a big contender.

The good: easy to use, cute styling, terrific value for the price

The bad: long-in-the-tooth OS, underpowered Web browser

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