Palm directs Sprint to Centro
New smartphone line revealed
Palm has confirmed its next-gen smartphone is to be called the Centro and that it's due to hit North American store shelves this coming autumn, initially courtesy of carrier Sprint.
It was Sprint that prompted the admission. The carrier spilled the beans on the Centro yesterday at a technology conference. It revealed the handset - claimed to be Palm's smallest yet - will run the Palm OS and support EvDO high-speed cellular data connectivity.
Palm later told website Palm Infocenter that these details were correct, but it refused to say anything about specific release dates, prices or what the phone will look like.
That will inevitably send Palm fans back to the pics that appeared on the web a couple of months ago:
Palm's Gandolf: the Centro design?
These were said to show a device codenamed 'Gandolf' - presumably not a typo but an attempt to avoid legal action from JRR Tolkien's estate - that, as you can see, sports a new look.
Palm did say Centro will feature a design intended to appeal to younger consumers, and it's hard not to see that goal in Gandolf's looks.
COMMENTS
Treo 3/4 Duplex Disease
Never mind about the frequent crashes, how about the ability to simply operate as a telephone. Telephones are full duplex right? ie you can both talk at the same time and be heard at the same time. Half duplex is like a walky talky; one talks the other listens. How about a "telephone" where the owner (person A) can always hear the other end (person B), but B can only hear A when B is not talking. I am given to understand that this problem is present in many Treo models; it certainly seems to be present in my UK spec 650.
Try this; ring someone patient with your Treo. Ask them to count up to 5000 in thousands (ie 1000, 2000, 3000 etc) and while they are doing so, you say something to them. When they are done, ask them what you said. If the reply is that you didn't say anything, then your phone has 3/4 duplex disease.
Maybe they should fix this before adding any more bells and whistles. Phones are expected to be full duplex these days. It's not really a phone if it isn't.
Does it run crashhappy palm or stable linux
Cause if its just running garnet count me out. Personally i love my treo 700P but the damn thing crashes all the time. I am not going to shell out even 1 dollar for another palm device running garnet. Now if its running linux and i can get a shell? ill happily plop down whatever the cost is...
But garnet, NFW! As much as i love my treo the thing is as unstable as a windows ME machine with 5 megs of free disk space and active desktop enabled.
The day they release something running linux i will buy it, BUT if someone beats them to market. Goodbye Palm, hello the new love of my life! Personally i do not care which it is but Palm should care and get their Ass in gear cause we all know its going to happen.
I'm almost hoping that palm does drop the ball on this, then they can see how important it is granted it would be to late but it would show them what the market thinks of a unstable OS for a cell phone. Palm OS is ok for a PDA but smartphones demand more than a PDA based OS and are totally lacking the stability consumers expect from a cellphone. Never heard of cellphone crashes till i got a treo.
But what will it run?
If it's just going to be Garnet v5.4.9.1, I'm not really interested in the fact that 6 of the buttons have been rotated through 90 degrees.
