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Palm Centro Cell Phone Review - Messaging

Alfredo Padilla Published on October 25, 2007 Comment on this

Intro Making/Receiving Calls Software Other Features

Tour & Design Messaging Battery Life Value & Comparisons

Audio Quality Organizer Connectivity Conclusion

Imaging Multimedia Hardware Ratings & Specs

Supported E-mail Services (7.5)
The Centro uses the same Versamail software that has been found on Palm OS devices for years. This software supports both standard POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail servers, and also supports easy setup of popular e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo!, and AOL. We were happy to see that when setting up these popular e-mail services all we had to do was enter our e-mail address and password — the software took care of everything else for us. This is a major improvement over Series 60 devices like the Nokia N95, which require you to enter server settings.

Push E-mail (3.0)
The Centro supports push e-mail via Exchange Activesync. You can also get support for push e-mail via BlackBerry Connect, but this requires additional software.

Multiple E-mail Accounts (10.0)
The Centro supports at least five e-mail accounts, and probably more, which should be sufficient for power e-mail users.

HTML and Attachements (4.0)
Like previous Palm OS devices, the Centro does not support HTML e-mail, which is a feature now found on several other phones, including Windows Mobile 6 devices and the iPhone. Attachment support is provided via Documents2Go, and allows you to view or edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF documents. Unfortunately there is no support for ZIP files.

Email Customizations (10.0)
The Palm Centro provides a good selection of e-mail customization options. You can choose between three different display fonts, and one of these display fonts allows you to choose between two different font sizes. These are applied to both displayed e-mails and your composition font. You can also create signatures that are automatically added to outgoing messages, and choose whether e-mails in your inbox are shown on two lines or one.

Time to a New Message (10.75)
To see how long it takes to compose a new e-mail message on the Palm Centro we timed how long it took to go from the home screen unlocked until we had opened a new e-mail dialogue. We repeated this test five times and took the average for our score. The Palm Centro took 1.86 seconds to open a new e-mail dialogue. This is an excellent time, on par with the BlackBerry Curve and Apple iPhone and significantly faster than the HTC Mogul. We found it very easy to just hit the letter "E" on the keyboard, which took us directly to the e-mail icon on the home screen. Once the e-mail program was launched, which was almost instantaneous, we just tapped the "new" button at the bottom of the screen to start composing a new e-mail message. This is an excellent example of Palm's ease of use and fast interface.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Centro	1.86	10.75
Sony Ericsson W580i	n/a - no e-mail client	0.00
BlackBerry Curve 8320	1.70	11.76
HTC Mogul	6.22	3.22
Palm Treo 700p	2.66	7.52
Apple iPhone	1.90	10.53

E-mail Usability (9.5)
Versamail on the Palm Centro is fairly simple to use. Messages are displayed in a simple list with contact name, title, and date shown. You use up and down on the d-pad to move between messages. There are three buttons at the bottom of the screen that allow you to create a new message, get more messages from the server, or choose sort options. You can sort by subject, sender, size, or date. When you open an e-mail message you are given several other options at the bottom of the screen, including forward, delete, and reply. We had some trouble finding the Bcc and Cc fields, but you activate them via a very small icon found on the top left, next to the icon that allows you to add attachments.

The problems come when you try to switch between accounts. Unlike Windows Mobile, which allows you to move between accounts using left and right on the d-pad, or BlackBerry, which has a unified inbox, Palm OS requires you to go through the menu system to switch to another account. This quickly becomes annoying for anyone who has several accounts. Aside from this issue however we found the interface easy to use and intuitive.

Like other Palm OS devices, the Centro automatically creates a filtered list of matching e-mail addresses as you type a contact name into the send fields. Unfortunately, this only matches first or last name. BlackBerry devices also can match the actual e-mail address or company name. Still, it comes in very useful for quickly adding contacts to an outgoing e-mail address.

Supported IM Services (0.0)
The Centro comes loaded with Sprint's instant messaging program, which allows you to access AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. You can sign into all three services concurrently, which is a nice feature missing from most carrier-based IM services. Unfortunately, the problem of each instant message sent or received costing you a text message is still there, so the Palm Centro doesn't receive any points in this area. There are plenty of third-party instant messaging clients out there that won't charge you a text message for each IM sent.

MMS Support (9.0)
Multimedia messages, or picture mail as they are known on Sprint devices, are very well integrated on the Palm Centro. The unified messaging application provides one simple interface that handles both text and multimedia messages, a feature we have always loved about Palm devices. MMS is also well integrated into the camera and album applications.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (10.0)
For those who love smiley faces, the Palm Centro is for you. Incoming smiley faces are turned into graphical representations rather than being left in plain text, and there's an easy shortcut to add a smiley face to outgoing text messages. You couldn't ask for anything more; it's enough to bring a smile to our faces.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (8.0)
The messaging application on the Palm Centro is excellent, as we've come to expect from Palm devices. Both SMS and MMS are handled by this single application; to turn an SMS into an MMS just add a photo, video, or audio recording, simple as that. The best thing about the messaging application is that it organizes your text messages into conversations. It was actually Palm and the Treo that originally popularized this innovation, not the iPhone, which also has a threaded SMS application.

Time to a New SMS Message (11.63)
To see how easy it is to create a new SMS message we timed how long it took to go from the home screen unlocked until we had a new SMS dialogue on the screen. We repeated this test five times and took the average for our score. We were very impressed with the Centro's performance in this test, as it put up the best score of any of our comparison phones at 0.86 seconds. This is facilitated by the fact that there is a dedicated button that takes you directly to the messaging application. Once there, just tap on the "new" button at the bottom left of the screen. It couldn't be simpler than that. Combined with the excellent messaging application and usable, if small, QWERTY keyboard, this phone is perfect for SMS addicts.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Centro	0.86	11.63
Sony Ericsson W580i	1.54	6.49
BlackBerry Curve 8320	4.22	2.37
HTC Mogul	5.46	1.83
Palm Treo 700p	1.40	7.14
Apple iPhone	2.62	3.82

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