Just Friday morning, my wife relented and decided to give a smartphone a try.  After opting to take over ownership of my arctic while Palm Centro, I spent Friday telling her about all of the ways that it was going to help her life.  Upon returning home Friday evening, the Centro hit the charger in my office while I formatted a 4 GB microSD card for it.

Saturday morning rolled around and I was brave.  I asked to see if she was serious, to see if she changed her mind.  She hadn’t, and still wanted to try out the Centro.  Her first question:  “If I decide I like it, can I have it?  I don’t want you taking it away from me!”.  After assuring her that I had another and that she could indeed have it, I prepared it for use.

I quickly exported all of the contacts from her feature phone to her SIM card.  The Palm OS received a hard reset to clear it’s memory from all of the programs I ran on it.  No need to overwhelm her at the start, right?.  On the memory card I built an initial application repository, fresh with TakePhone, Resco Explorer and a few themes (a pink one).  TakePhone was installed to RAM and set up with a minimal interface.  The bar at the bottom of the main page received five icons:  Camera, Video Recorder, Media (pics and video viewer), Calendar and Tasks.  The most common of her contacts were added to TakePhone’s speed dial page.

We then spent a bit of time going over how TakePhone works.  She liked the overall simplicity of being able to find her contacts.  She liked the shortcuts to the features of the phone I mentioned above.  She liked the pink theme.  Next we talked about some of the more technical aspects of the Palm OS.  You know the big one.. the fact that even though you turn it off, the device isn’t actually off.  That one took a minute or two to explain, since her feature phone couldn’t have the device on without the phone being on.  The discussion went back to the original intent of the Palm OS, to have an instant on device that you could enter appointments, tasks, contacts or memos into.  She said it made a lot of sense.  We stopped there for day one.

Day two and we moved on to pictures.  Having just had some photos taken of our little one, I added them to her card and showed her how to access them.  Early afternoon rolled around when we were at her parent’s house, where she quickly pulled out her Centro (proudly telling her Mom that she just got a new phone) and proceeded to show off the pictures.

All in all, looks like we’ve got another smartphone user among us.  Over the next couple of days and weeks, she’ll slowly be introduced to some of the more advanced things that she can do.  Best to let her ask!

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