Palm Inc has unveiled its new youth-orientated smartphone, the Palm Centro.
Nicely styled and available in a rather fetching ‘iPalm’ white, the Centro is an unashamed attempt by Palm to ditch the stuffy spreadsheets, kick off the brogues, slip into some Etnies, grab the snowboard and get on down with the kids.
As if to ram this last point home, the Centro website features a series of excruciating images of painfully trendy, overly self-confident preppy young folk. They're laughing manically at whatever it is that happens to be filling the two-inch colour screen on their Centros. The whole point, remember, is that you can be just like them…
But enough of our jaded cynicism. A closer inspection of the Centro itself reveals that it’s basically a scaled down version of Palm’s decidedly more grown-up Treo 500 – a smartphone, only with a slightly lower IQ if you will.
Palm OS
Whereas the recently released Treo 500 runs on Windows Mobile, the Centro is powered by Palm’s 5.4.9 OS. Despite this, the Centro is capable of performing most of the same tricks as its older, wiser sibling, including email, web-browsing and general organising duties.
One major shortcoming is that although the Centro boasts GSM, GPRS and EDGE there’s no 3G functionality. It does sport Bluetooth 1.1 though. Internal memory is limited to 64MB, but can be expanded via Micro SD card up to 4GB. The onboard camera, which can also shoot video, is a rather paltry 1.3-megapixel affair
On the plus side, the Centro comes bundled with a range of software, including Google Maps, Documents to Go (for reading MS Office and PDF files with), and PocketTunes for listening to all the hippest young modern beat combos with.
The Palm Centro is available now, priced at £199.99.
