Palm Centro for Sprint officially outed, $99 on October 14
Not like it was a secret or anything, but Palm officially unveiled the Palm Centro today at DigitalLife in New York City. The Palm OS device will cost $99 after all discounts and with a two-year Sprint agreement; Sprint has exclusivitity for 90 days after launch, which is October 14th. Onyx black or ruby red are your choices: if you like shiny, you’ll like the red.
Some might not be jazzed with the Centro, but when I step back and look at the phone, I’m actually impressed from a value standpoint. For under $100 you’re getting a 320 x 320 touchscreen smartphone with fast EV-DO connectivity, camera, multimedia capability and full QWERTY keyboard; smartphones have definitely come a long way and at a price like this will certainly become more mainstream.
That’s $100 and Sprint owns your cellphone soul for two years.
It costs as much as an iPhone 4GB if you don’t contract with Sprint for two years.
It’s no iPhone — it has a keyboard, for one — but I’m pretty sure you need to get service from either AT&T or T-Mobile in the U.S. if you have an iPhone (and if you go the T-Mobile route, their recent update will brick your phone) so comparing the price-with-plan to the iPhone-without-plan is a bit unfair.
I’m tempted to get one to try the PalmOS out; I’ve been pretty happy with my Windows Mobile Smartphone (WM5, so no Standard/Professional), but I can’t seem to find a good IRC program for it.
Also, I hear the Centro has RevA. Not that Rev0 is as slow as edge (hi, iPhone), but I’m one of the users who voted “tether” in the poll earlier… any little bit helps, and keeping my real name far away, PDAnet works on the PalmOS, too.
I got some hands on time with it today in NYC and it felt nice. For $100 it should really open up the smart phone market to a wider range of customers. And for the record, we at Sling Media will be supporting the device.
I thought it didn’t have a touch screen. I thought it was just like the Motorola Q.
Yeah I am getting confused about what the definition of smartphone is. I was always under the impression that a smartphone had no touchscreen. Yet I see Treo’s being called that and my new i760 has smartphone all over the box
The Centro has a touchscreen and runs Palm OS; pretty standard for a Palm smartphone. A Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone or Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition device does not have a touchscreen; that might be reason for the confusion. WM 5 Pocket PC Edition & WM 6 Professional have touchscreens.
I attended a wireless technology panel in Atlanta a few weeks ago and the first question was, “What’s a smartphone?” I’m not sure I agreed completely with any of the panelists – the only one who had a real concrete definition was the guy who said something about an open OS that you could install things on, but that would exclude the iPhone. In the old days, I think smartphone referred to a phone having PDA+PIM functionality. Now, who knows where the line is? I think it’s much more a gradient in functionality than smartphone vs non-smartphone.
Dave, you are correct, it’s no longer easy to define a smartphone. Me personally I feel that a phone is a smartphone if it lets me work the web and also interact with work documents. Not specific but that’s the way I see it.