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Palm Centro Cell Phone Review - Organizer

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

Synchronization (7.0)
The Palm Centro ships with Palm's desktop software, which allows you to easily synchronize information between your phone and computer. Setup is simple and straightforward — simply install the software, connect the phone, and go through the setup wizard. Most users should have no problems getting this working.

We were quite satisfied with the Centro's support for synchronization. You can use either the included USB cable or Bluetooth to synchronize wirelessly. Contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, e-mail accounts, and notes are all synchronized, with a good selection of options to tailor to your needs.

Palm's desktop software application can act as a PIM manager on your computer that synchronizes with your Centro. You can also synchronize with Outlook.

Alerts (7.0)
Alerts on the Palm Centro can only be set for calendar appointments, not tasks. You can set an alert to go off at any time before the appointment occurs, which provides some nice flexibility. You can't set unique alert sounds for each appointment, however — instead you will need to set the universal sound in the preferences. When an alert sounds you get a full screen indicator that displays information about the appointment. You can dismiss, view, or snooze the appointment. Snooze lasts for five minutes, and there's no option to adjust this. If an alert is missed it will sound again based on your preference setting. If you miss it entirely it will be the first thing you see on the screen when you turn the phone back on. Overall it's pretty solid, about the only thing we are missing is better snooze control.

Over-the-Air PIM Sync (2.0)
The Palm Centro supports over-the-air synchronization of your calendar appointments and contacts with an Exchange Server. It does not support synchronization of tasks or notes. For business users working in an Exchange environment this is invaluable, and makes the Centro a realistic business device.

Address Book

Adding Contacts (8.18)
To see how easy it is to add a contact to the Palm Centro we timed how long it took to go from the home screen unlocked until we added each of five different contact names and their phone numbers. We took the average time for our score. The Centro took an average of 12.22 seconds to add a new contact, which is pretty good. We found the fastest way to access the contacts application was to jump into the phone application, which automatically highlights a shortcut to contacts, activated by hitting the center select button.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Centro	12.22	8.18
Sony Ericsson W580i	22.74	4.40
BlackBerry Curve 8320	14.10	7.09
HTC Mogul	14.70	6.80
Palm Treo 700p	17.70	5.65
Apple iPhone	20.86	4.79

Looking/Sorting/Search (5.5)
You can sort your contacts by last name or company name — there is no option to sort by first name. You can also filter your contacts by category. Searching for contacts is simple — just start typing either the first or last name (or company name when organizing by company), and the list of contacts will be automatically filtered for you. Other than the lack of support for sorting by first name, we were pretty happy with the options here.

Fields (8.0)
The Palm Centro provides you with 30 different fields, including advanced fields like category, notes, and up to nine custom fields. We found the selection of fields to be sufficient for just about any user, especially with the large selection of customizable fields for whatever information you want.

Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (2.33)
The Palm Centro has excellent speed dial support, allowing you to assign any contact (or application if you prefer) to any letter key on the QWERTY keyboard. Unfortunately there is no support for voice dialing, either via voice tags or voice recognition. There are several third-party applications, like VoiceDiaIt, that provide this functionality.

Calendar

Adding Calendar Items (20.83)
To see how quickly we can add a new calendar appointment we timed how long it took to add a lunch appointment for the following day with a reminder 15 minutes beforehand. We repeated this test five times and took the average for our score. The Palm Centro took 4.8 seconds to add a new appointment, which is an outstanding time and beat out all of our comparison devices. We should note that we cheated a little; by default the Centro adds an alert five minutes before the appointment, and we changed this to fifteen minutes for our test. If you have to change the alert manually it will add a few seconds to the time of adding the appointment. We were helped significantly by the fact that you can just hit the dedicated calendar button to launch the calendar, then navigate to the date and time you want and start typing.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Centro	4.80	17.24
Sony Ericsson W580i	14.04	7.12
BlackBerry Curve 8320	6.04	16.56
HTC Mogul	7.22	13.85
Palm Treo 700p	12.18	8.21
Apple iPhone	18.92	5.29

Calendar Views (7.1)
The Palm Centro provides you with five different calendar views. The default view is the daily view, and you'll probably spend most of your time here. This shows hour blocks along the left with corresponding appointments on the right. It is very reminiscent of the daily view you get on a BlackBerry device. The weekly view shows the typical grid of days along the top and time along the left with appointments blocked out. When a day is highlighted in this view you get a small pop-up at the top of the screen that shows you appointment details for that day, which is very helpful.

The monthly view is less useful. You see the current month with a small box indicating days that have an appointment. Unfortunately the monthly view lacks the pop-up box that the weekly view has showing appointment details, so it's really only useful for looking up a date. The agenda view provides a great deal of information. It shows a list of that days appointments, tasks, and unread e-mail. This is somewhat reminiscent of the active home screens you see on Windows Mobile or Series 60 devices. You can easily cycle between views by hitting the calendar button. Finally, there is a yearly calendar view accessed via the menu button.

Fields (11.0)
Creating a new appointment on the Palm Centro can be somewhat confusing. If you hit the new button in daily view you are given some options; start/end time, all-day appointment, and time zone. Once an appointment has been set you are taken back to the daily view to enter the title. Once that's completed, select the appointment and details where you are given other fields. These include the alarm, location, category, and repetition. You can also add a text note or set the appointment to private. We found the selection of fields to be adequate, but wish the interface was cleaner and less complicated.

To Do/Tasks

Adding To Do/Task (8.68)
To see how easy it is to add a new task to the Palm Centro we timed how long it took to go from the home screen unlocked until we had added a test task reminding us to pick up groceries. We repeated this test five times and took the average time for our score. The Palm Centro took an average of 11.52 seconds to add our test task. This is a very good time, faster than all our comparison phones. We found it easy to open the tasks program by hitting the "T" key on the QWERTY to quickly jump to the program. The most time was taken up setting the due date for the task, which requires entering an additional interface. We also made good use of the touch screen to quickly tap the items we wanted instead of moving around with the d-pad.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Centro	11.52	8.68
Sony Ericsson W580i	16.56	6.04
BlackBerry Curve 8320	14.80	6.76
HTC Mogul	16.02	6.24
Palm Treo 700p	12.90	7.75
Apple iPhone	n/a - no tasks program	0.00

To Do/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (7.0)
The Palm Centro's task program allows you to filter your tasks by category. It also allows you to prioritize tasks, but you cannot sort your tasks by priority.

Fields (8.0)
When you create a new task on the Palm Centro you are given a decent selection of fields to choose from. You can set the title, priority, category, due date, and set an alarm. You can also add a note to the task and set a recurrence pattern. We especially like seeing advanced options like recurrence on the Centro.

Notes

Adding Notes (5.91)
To see how easy it is to add notes to the Palm Centro we timed how long it took to go from the home screen unlocked until we had added a simple note about a lunch appointment. We repeated the test five times and took the average for our score. The Centro performed well in our test, taking an average of 8.96 seconds. This is better than most of our other comparison phones, as you can see below. Only the Treo 750p performed better, probably helped by its more comfortable keyboard. We found ourselves again using the keyboard as a shortcut to the program we wanted, just hitting "M" to jump to the memo program. From there, just hit the center select key and start typing.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Centro	8.46	5.91
Sony Ericsson W580i	12.00	4.17
BlackBerry Curve 8320	12.20	4.10
HTC Mogul	12.56	3.98
Palm Treo 700p	8.30	6.02
Apple iPhone	12.66	3.95

Note Interface (6.0)
The notes interface on the Palm Centro is a bit better than most phones we've reviewed. You see a simple list of notes with the newest at the bottom of the list. Above this is a drop down box that allows you to filter notes by category. Unfortunately, there is no support for searching through your notes, as found on BlackBerry devices. However, we were very pleased with the categories supported and generally found the interface easy to use.

Note Formatting (5.0)
Most notes programs provide no formatting options, so we were pleased to see the Palm Centro allows you to choose between two font types and sizes. That's about the only formatting options you get, however — you can't add hand drawn notes, as you can on Windows Mobile devices, nor can you add media items or do things like italicize, bold, or underline items.

Voice Memo (7.0)
The voice memo program on the Centro provides pretty good functionality. We like that you can get quick access to it by pressing and holding the shortcut key on the left side of the device, although you need to continue holding down the key as long as you want to record. The interface itself is fairly simple and easy to use — there is a list of voice recordings at the bottom and above this are the recording controls. You can easily send a voice recording via e-mail or Bluetooth by hitting the small envelope icon, but there is no support for more advanced features like categorization.

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