Palm Centro AT&T - Review

Palm Centro AT&T - Review Welcome to the PhoneArena.com review of the AT&T Palm Centro. The Centro is carried by AT&T is nearly identical to the Sprint Centro we reviewed several months back. Today we’ll focus on the highlights of what is different between the two. As you can see in the design is nearly identical. The dimensions are the same where you may or may not be able to tell in this video. The black for the Centro from AT&T is jet black as opposed to the Mica black from the Sprint Centro. The other color option available is white which Sprint is not carrying. Obviously the CDMA radio has been swapped out for GSM1 and in this case it is Quad Band radio. One thing that is missing however is 3G data. Instead it runs on the image network which immediately makes this Centro a step down from the CDMA EV-DO variant. That said there are still a ton of things that we love about this phone just like we did the first time around. The size is still perfect for the hand and the keyboard though small is very easy to use. The Palm operating system is very straightforward, very simplistic which we find to be both great for new users but a drawback for power users. As always there is plenty of third party applications available to make the phone do what you want which just at least looked a little bit prettier. AT&T didn’t take to deliver the skinning phone application however. Now we have a five-tab orientation for your recent calls, contacts, wallpaper screen which serves no other purpose, favorites, and your dial pad. One thing that does allow user to do is to set a wallpaper as you can see here without losing the dial pad which you would do in a normal Palm software. The difference isn’t really functional, no big deal but it is sort of this little things that makes the phone look a little bit nicer. The other major 3G difference, everything else is pretty much carrier customization. For instance, AT&T includes the Push to Talk software in the phone. The Sprint has not. Xpress mail replaces Sprint mobile in email. AT&T music offers according to music, or listen to XM Radio. You have other very similar products. For instance, the instant messaging program as the exact the same one from the Sprint but this time it has AT&T branding. Just as before, we really liked the service. It allows you to sign on to all three of the programs at the same time and it does run on the background. MobiTV is in place of Sprint TV and as it fires up channel here you can see that note times and video quality as well as audio quality is good. One thing that we did find however is that as we move around sometimes we will lose the signal and then it would take a while to catch up. This is basically the same technology used in the Sprint TV service so we’re not to surprised to find out that it is pretty similar. We feel that the reason that it takes a while to catch up is because the Edge data speeds as opposed to the EV-DO speeds. The main features remain the same with the same Palm Star Wars we’ve seen in three years. For instance, the calendar, the contact list, the camera and camcorder are all the same. Documents to go will handle Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. Pocket tunes is also on board to handle your media playback and again it’s a great program. Another difference with this one Sprint version is AT&T is including navigation service. It’s something that you pay up to the form but at least you have the option and the last thing is they’ve included voice signal for their voice downloading program. It just processes the voice to man program we’ve found on the Sprint version in other Palm phones. We love the voice in the program. It works great and you finally notice the OEM phone. The voice command program on other Palm products is much more full featured and it allows you to do several things such as compose emails straight from your voice. That is one thing that we really wish we will able to see on this version. Lastly, if we go find the web. As you can see here the page will take a little while to load. It actually preloaded this page so it makes it a bit quicker but in general took us on a better side of five minutes to load the program webpage. It did run with the page relatively accurately. Again, Palm is using Blazer but the slow page loads are not definitely noticeable over the Edge network. All things considered we still like this GSM Palm Centro very much. Well, I was quite enamored with it as we were with those CDMA Centro mostly because the lack of 3G radio. There remains an excellent entry level Smartphone or smaller option for those looking for all the power of regular Palm device. The full QWERTY keyboard is easy to use. The screen is bright, crisp and responsive and the size is perfect for just about any hand plus at a $99.00 price point it is pretty hard—