Monday, September 1, 2008

Palm Centro


So a couple months ago I bought a new phone, the Palm Centro from Sprint. It was a big improvement over my Nokia 6275i from Cricket. It has a shitload of features, it's a smartphone after all.

There's a lot of software for it. It runs pretty much everything made for Palm OS. I've loaded this phone with all kinds of crap. It has a pretty decent Xscale processor that is fast enough to run a super nintendo emulator. I installed tcpmp which allows me to play almost every video format. I've got PalmVNC so I can use my desktop computer away from home. I was even able to install Java so I could run many MIDP apps, including an SSH client. However, Palm no longer provides java and the copy I installed was quite buggy, causing the phone to crash and reboot. After installing a centro update so I could use the "my location" feature on google maps, java would no longer work. sad. :(
It has a touch screen which is really awesome and easy to use. I've gotten so accustomed to it that I keep trying to touch the screen on my other devices, which only leads to failure :(.
It's a very nice phone and I'm pretty satisfied with it, but it has a few problems...
  • Palm OS is very buggy. Sometimes I'm watching video or using some program, and it just randomly reboots. the boot up is very slow.
  • The Palm OS interface isn't exactly pretty. It looks the same as it always has.
  • The battery life could be longer. Although it's probably more than adequate for the average user, it has a lot of features that I like to play with all the time. I drain the shit out of it. It charges fast though.
  • Java does not work after updating the centro software. It just causes the phone to reboot.(please let me know if you manage to get it working)
  • The browser is decent but also sucks in a lot of ways. Opera Mini does not work.
It's still a very nice phone. It does a lot and is very affordable, but get the treo instead if you have the money.
I'll keep the phone until the end of my contract, but then I'll look into something else. I'd really like to have an open linux based phone or maybe something using Google's Android.

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