New Palm Centro Picture Posted

In all fairness, EVDO Rev. A & a touchscreen for $99 w/ contract is not too bad of a deal at all, regardless of what the rest of the specs are. I'd love to know what the price for the phone purchaed at full retail will be. Probably $300 ish?

Now that an official pic has been leaked, I want to see some official looking specs on this thing!

I think the three crucial areas are going to end up being: keyboard usability & size, screen legibility & size, and battery life. I've seen my 700p churn through a 2400mAh Seidio battery in a day in intermittent reception areas so i'm really worried about the Centro's battery life. Multimedia SHOULD also be at least decently represented (3.5mm stereo headphone jack & full version of PTunes standard) but that's a very un-Palm-like thing to do.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

I tend toward favoring battery life, readability, ergonomics, reliability, build quality and internal specifications. Nice that it seems to have EVDO Rev A - was that technology too fresh to put in the recently released 755 (their $650 smartphone)?

my questions -

1. how can they make any money on it at $99 even with carrier subsidies??? have we reached true commoditization of the smartphone?

2. will this smartphone be weak in terms of specs and features? I need a decent level of RAM, processing speed, software, features, etc.

3. if it's priced cheap and spec'd out, won't it cannibalize the Treo lineup? there must be a catch somewhere.

4. i REALLY like the look/form factor - and assuming it has power specs/features, i'd pay up to $399 for it.

They also used a screenshot that fills the whole screen, adding to the illusion of a rectangle screen.

The device really looks slick in this photo, great job palm! A much better color scheme than in those blurry pics earler this summer. If I wasn't waiting for palm os II this would be a very tempting device. My 4 year old T3 can probably wait out 1 more year for a smartphone upgrade.

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If you feel like you're under control, you're just not going fast enough.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/picture-exclusive/palm-centro-leaked-official-shot-293414.php

Is Palm engaged in official leaking now?

Whoa -- they know the big World Wide Web exists now? Doesn't that deserve a headline too?

Now look at them.

Praising -- praising! -- the Centro.

The Centro that was all *my* baby. Me, mine, me, I wanted that.

And now they applaud.

Fear me.

But then again, my way too big thumbs and my way too old eyes both tell me that there is likely little chance I can be happy trying to use this smartphone, particularly as a PDA replacement. Minimally, if the keyboard were just the standard twelve number keys I could at least use it as cell phone replacement that "just happened" to run Palm OS. That'd be kinda cool. But I'm very concerned that I wouldn't even be able to use this keyboard for dialing numbers. Predictive typing on a 12 button keypad is quite functional as well. Why not just do that? And if the $99 price with contract were true, this is a great deal. They just might have a winner on their hands.

Oh the pain. Again, Palm is close to making a smartphone that I might actually buy. But it just falls short. Why must they always have a qwerty keyboard?


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Now, on to the real purpose of this device. The app on-screen tells it all. Palm is going after the youth texting craze. Maybe in a big way. It looks like tabbed apps that brings AOL+WMsngr+Yahoo all together at once. No more friends here and fiends there. Tie it all together in one place with a full keyboard.

Is Palm going to have an AOL, MSN, Yahoo, probably ICQ etc etc app running? Doubtful. Keeping all that up to date would be worse than a Windows desktop. I think they are going to do this all Web2.0 style on Palm.net and simply use the smartfone as the generic "dumb device". But since the servers do all the work, this dumbphone brings everyone together, regardless of where they are, on a PC or phone.

Is this the big thing that the official mentioned?

How on GGE is the same Palm, that apparently can't leverage WiFi with the carriers, going to do something without the carrier ringing the texting register? Or, will Palm+carrier charge for this?

This phone may run Palm OS (Rev A? Hmmm?), but it will not appeal to hardcore PDA geeks found round here. This is a completely different market. One that may like the little orange, the colored phone, and the Palm Pilot legacy. Hey they also have no clue about the horrible tortures their customers have endured recently either. And that's a good thing, right?

Maybe I presume way to much here and just need to go to bed.

Pat Horne