Palm Centro Cell Phone Review - Multimedia
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Alfredo Padilla Published on October 25, 2007 Comment on this |
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Accessing Music Software (6.21)
To see how easy it is to get music playing on your Centro we timed how long it took to get a song playing, starting from the home screen unlocked. We repeated this process five times and took the average time for our score. The Centro took an average of 3.22 seconds to get a song playing. You can see below that this is a good time, but is matched or bettered by several handsets. In particular, the Sony Ericsson W580i was almost twice as fast to the draw in terms of getting a song playing. We were generally pleased with the Palm Centro's performance in this test, however. | Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Palm Centro | 3.22 | 6.21 |
| Sony Ericsson W580i | 1.56 | 12.82 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 7.62 | 2.62 |
| HTC Mogul | 6.06 | 3.30 |
| Palm Treo 700p | 3.10 | 6.45 |
| Apple iPhone | 3.10 | 6.45 |
Dedicated Music Controls (1.0)
The Palm Centro's volume controls can be used to adjust music volume while playing, however these are the only music controls you will find on the handset. For everything else you have to open the music software. You should note, however, that Pocket Tunes (pTunes) does have a preference that allows you to assign either the calendar or messaging button to bring the program up while music is playing, however this option is turned off by default.
Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.0)
The Palm Centro uses pTunes for music playback. This software has been a stalwart for Palm OS devices and provides a reasonable selection of functionality. When we reviewed the Treo 700p earlier this year Palm was only shipping a stripped-down version of pTunes, which required a purchased update to unlock many features. We're happy to see the Centro includes a fully-featured version. pTunes recognized our standard M3U playlist and allows you to edit and create playlists on the device. It recognized tags for all three of our test file types: Windows Media, MP3, and iTunes AAC. You can sort your music by title, artist, album, or genre. There is no support for searching through your music or rating it. pTunes recognizes all the file types it can play on your device, regardless of where it's stored. Unfortunately, there is no support for album art. We were pleased to see you can play music in the background, however. There is also an equalizer on board, with both presets and the ability to adjust it manually. You can also create new equalizer settings.
Overall, we found pTunes on the Palm Centro to be a fully-featured music playback solution, but we did find the interface was a little clunkier than the Series 60 music player or the iPod on the iPhone.
Online Song Downloading (0.0)
Unlike many other Sprint devices we've reviewed lately, the Palm Centro does not support Sprint's music store. This is a shame, as we can't see any technical reason why the software couldn't be supported. It's been ported over to other smart phone platforms like Windows Mobile (on the HTC Mogul), and the Centro can support Java applications with an add-on application.
Streaming (4.0)
We were pleased to see the Palm Centro supports streaming audio via MP3 or Windows Media formats. It did not support streaming Real Audio. The Centro also has support for streaming radio stations built into the pTunes software.
Podcast Support (0.0)
The Centro doesn't include any software to download or organize podcasts on the phone.
Music Sync with PC (7.0)
You can synchronize music between the Palm Centro and your computer using Windows Media Player. This makes it easy and straightforward to move music back and forth.
Music Formats and DRM (3.0)
The Palm Centro does not support any form of DRM protected music. It does play unprotected WMA, MP3, and AAC files.
Music Interruption (9.0)
The Palm Centro does a solid job of handling incoming calls when music is playing. The music is immediately paused when the call comes in, and started up again right after the call ended. About the only thing we are missing here is a nice fade-out and fade-in feature, like the iPhone has.
Video
Video Software Access (6.33)
To see how easy it is to get a video playing on the Palm Centro we timed how long it took to go from the home screen unlocked until we had a video playing. We did this test five times and took the average time for our score. The Palm Centro took an average of 3.16 seconds, which is a good time, but is matched by many of our comparison phones, as you can see below.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Palm Centro | 3.16 | 6.33 |
| Sony Ericsson W580i | 3.42 | 5.85 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 8.08 | 2.48 |
| HTC Mogul | 7.64 | 2.62 |
| Palm Treo 700p | 5.00 | 4.00 |
| Apple iPhone | 3.20 | 6.25 |
Video Controls (4.0)
Video controls on the Palm Centro are fairly basic. When you play a video it immediately goes into Full Screen mode, although we should note that few of our test videos took advantage of all the screen real estate. The volume keys do their thing while the center select button on the d-pad stops the video playback and takes you back to the album screen. Left and right on the d-pad move to the next or previous video in the album. Pressing up or down on the d-pad reveals on-screen controls that just replicate what you can do with buttons. The controls are very bare bones — we saw better selection from the HTC Mogul, Apple iPhone, and even the BlackBerry Curve.
Video Software & Organization (1.5)
The Palm Centro uses the built-in Pics & Video application to playback videos, which is basically just the album software, rather than true multimedia-focused software. Videos are organized into albums, and you can create your own albums if you wish. Videos and pictures are grouped together. There is no support for rating videos, playlists, or background play. There are also no library organization features like viewing videos by title, artist, or TV/movie. You can, however, re-sort the items in your current album by things like title or size. Compared to Windows Media Player Mobile on the HTC Mogul or the iPhone's iPod, the Centro's video software is very basic. Anyone who wants to use the Centro as a serious video playback device should probably invest in third-party software like CorePlayer.
Video Sync with PC (7.0)
As with music, you can synchronize videos with your PC using Windows Media Player. There is no support for other software like iTunes.
Video Formats (4.0)
The Palm Centro was able to play back all three of our test 3GP files, encoded with various codecs. It is also able to play back vanilla MPEG-4 files, as well as those encoded with the H264 codec. There is no support for other file types like Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media or Real, but 3GP and MP4 should cover most user's needs. If you need support for more file types we again recommend CorePlayer, which can play back just about any file type under the sun.
Video DRM (0.0)
The Palm Centro does not support any form of DRM-protected video. This means you can't use the phone with videos purchased from iTunes or Amazon's Unboxed store.
Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
We were happy to see the Palm Centro was able to play back all five of our video playback test files. These range from 56 Kbps to 768 Kbps, and the Centro handled the H264 encoded 768 Kbps MPEG-4 file without hiccups. This is nice because it allows you to watch relatively high-quality video on the Centro's 320 x 320 screen. You will need to make sure the video is encoded so it fits correctly on the screen, however, as some of our test files ended up being shown in only a postage stamp-sized area of the screen.
Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Palm Centro does not support any over-the-air video download services.
Video Streaming unscored
Because standards for mobile video streaming are undefined, we don't score this section. We do test a few of the more popular sites, however, to see how they do. We were pleased to see the Palm Centro was able to play back streaming 3GP encoded video from both YouTube Mobile and Zoovision Mobile. We were also able to play back Windows Media-encoded video from Windowsmedia.com. Of course, Sprint also provides a wide range of streaming video options that are available via Sprint TV on the Centro. Just make sure you're rate plan supports this feature.
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