Before I get into the details, let me just say that I absolutely love my new Palm Centro from Sprint. It’s everything I’ve come to love with the Treos but in a smaller form factor making it feel more like a phone. Sure it’s the same old Palm OS the Treos have been using for years, but I don’t really see that as a bad thing. And at $99 after a $200 instant rebate and $100 mail-in, you really can’t go wrong.
Friday morning I noticed over on the Treocentral forums that some people were getting Centros early from their local Sprint Stores. I decided to call around on my lunch break to see if they had any or if they would be getting some on Sunday for the official launch. Lucked out with my first phone call to the Sprint Store on Niagara Fall Boulevard when they said they had the black model in. Sweet! Didn’t want the red one anyways.
Stopped by the store on my way home from work and asked what sort of rebates were available on the Centro. Wasn’t sure what I would be eligible for since I’m a current customer so I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be paying the full $400. Turns out my contract with Sprint had expired a few weeks ago so I was up for renewal discount. Received the $200 instant rebate and they gave me a form to mail-in to receive an additional $100—bringing my total to $99 with tax after renewing for 2 years. Nice!
They had some problems selling me the phone because it didn’t seem to be in the computer properly yet. Started to get nervous that they would screw up my plan and I’d lose some of my grandfathered perks (free unlimited txt messaging and $10 unlimited Vision), but was assured that nothing would change since it was a simple phone upgrade. Sweet again.
Activated my phone, handed me my receipt, and I was off. Looks like Sprint is calling the Centro a Palm Treo 690 EVDO internally, because that’s what it said on my receipt. Funny… didn’t think they made a Treo 690 =). Well anyways. Got in my car and made a phone call just to make sure everything was activated correctly. Made that mistake once before when they activated me under another phone number… oopsies. My phone had problems provisioning data but it was able to make and receive calls, so I drove home.
Couldn’t test out Vision so I decided to clean up my contacts and calendar data and get ready to sync the Treo to my iMac for the first time. Didn’t bother installing the included software since I’m using Missing Sync to handle all that. Sync’ed my Treo 650 one last time and then pushed all the data from my computer to the Centro. All my applications and data synced over fine and I was feel pretty good about my purchase.
I eventually got the phone to provision and was able to connect to Vision. It wasn’t Power Vision so I didn’t get EVDO speeds, but it seemed on par with what I experienced on the 650. When I fired up Blazer later that evening it wouldn’t connect. Did some research on the Treocentral forums trying to figure out what the deal was or if the Vision services were down. Fast forward to Sunday and me calling Tech Support to figure out what the deal was. They told me that I needed to upgrade to Power Vision for $5 more a month since the Centro only works with that. Well whatever, I didn’t really mind paying that since I wanted the faster transfer speeds anyways.
Now everything is up and working how it should and I am in love. The screen is physically smaller than the Treos, but it has the same pixel count. I really can’t tell the difference to be honest. I like the new 5-way and the look of the hardware buttons—not sure why this phone gets so much hate for looking ugly, but I think it’s pretty slick. Although I will say that the battery cover sucks hard. It’s almost impossible to get off. I’m surprised I haven’t broken my phone yet just trying to remove it. Thankfully I won’t have to do that unless I have to perform a reset.
Oh and the keyboard. It’s smaller than the Treos, but I have had absolutely no problems typing on it like a champ. They have this rubbery cushion feel to them when you type which is nothing like the hard plastic keys on the Treos. I’m sure some people will have problems typing on the Centro’s keyboard, but I can blind type and pound away pretty fast from my experience with the Treo 600 and 650.
I’m sure many of the minor software improvements on the Centro popped up on the 755p, but are new to me. For starters the Contacts app now allows you to choose different ringtones for each contact. That’s nice. The camera application has a different interface than my 650 but seems to do all the same things (draw on pictures, add memos, email/beam photos). Blazer looks to have some improvements too. Looking through the manual I saw mention of being able to save images and sound files from websites. Haven’t tried it out yet but thats a welcomed addition.
The Centro also comes bundled with Documents to Go so I can open Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF documents. A few other nice included applications from Sprint are IM (support for AIM, MSN, and Yahoo) and Email (which is different from the included Versamail app).
All in all this phone is really nice. I never really thought the Treos were huge, but compared to the Centro they just feel big. Fits in my pocket nicely now and I don’t have to worry about breaking that annoying antennae off that the 650 had. Really really happy with my purchase. Maybe in two years when my Sprint contract runs out Apple will have finally opened up the iPhone to 3rd party applications. =)
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