Treo Centro: Reviews
From cnet.com
The good: The Palm Centro sheds some of the weight and bulk of Palm Treo to make for a more compact smartphone. It also carries an attractive price tag and offers a lot for the money, including Bluetooth, EV-DO support, push e-mail, and a suite of productivity apps.
The bad: The Centro's QWERTY keyboard is extremely cramped and the hardware feels a bit toylike. The phone's speaker is on the weaker side, and it lacks Wi-Fi.
The bottom line: The Palm Centro isn't the innovative product we were looking for from the company, but with its slimmer size, ease of use, and affordable price tag, the Centro is a good option for those looking for their first smartphone.
From Amazon.com
I bought this phone a few weeks ago when I was eligible for an upgrade. I decided to get the Centro because I find myself texting sometimes and wanting to write e-mails on my phone. (I used to have a Nokia 6030, and it's a good phone, but it's got a standard cell phone number keypad.)
My favorite thing about the phone is the Palm OS. If you've got another Palm, and you don't want to spend the money on a Treo 755p, then trust me -- this should be your phone.
Most, but not all Palm apps will transfer nicely over to the Centro. This is a huge benefit if you've got a bunch of Palm apps already, like I do. Out of the box, you can put all those apps on it, and have a phone more useful than any iPhone or BlackBerry out there. And if you've got a wireless keyboard, that'll work with the Centro, too, meaning you can use it for larger e-mails and working on Word documents (Oh, did I mention that Documents to Go is included in the box? :))
So here are the main advantages:
1) QWERTY keyboard
2) Tons of apps (and lots more free apps out there, if you look).
3) Simple Palm UI. Palm has always been the master of the intuitive UI, and this is no exception.
4) Pocket Tunes Deluxe included, which means that (preferably with an unlimited data plan) you can stream music from sites like shoutcast.com.
5) Free voice dialing included (with AT&T Centro -- NOT Sprint).
Some things not to like about the phone:
1) It's got Bluetooth, but you can't voice dial from a Bluetooth headset (at least, not natively -- there might be an app fix, but I don't know of one).
2) The keyboard is designed for tween/teen fingers. If you've got larger fingers, you'll have some trouble adjusting. Adjusting is possible, though. After about 3 weeks, I can type pretty proficiently (though I still look at the keys).
3) It doesn't come with any kind of micro-SD card. I know this might not sound like much of an omission, but when you've only got 64MB to play with, you'll start feeling that pretty fast -- especially if you're moving from a device like a Palm TX, that's got more memory. on board. Get yourself a decent-sized micro-SD card as soon as you can.
If the Centro had larger keys for the keyboard and the ability to voice dial over Bluetooth, I would've given it 5 stars. But as it is, it's almost perfect!