So I went to see the new Palm Centro today and I could not be more annoyed with this company. Don’t give me the “we need to go after the low end market” crap. You fed that to us last year with the equally uninspired launch of the 680. Have you forgotten the high end market? Have you forgotten the users who made the Treo a household name 5 years ago? The Treo brand used to mean something, now its just a punchline. Us Palm loyals have been jumping ship to Symbians, iPhones, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices for the past 3 years. Wait, maybe you’ll say everyone was spending their time on the Foleo and therefore our next-gen phone isn’t ready. Baloney. My advice, leave the low-end “entry-level” market alone, let them have their sidekicks and qwerty flip phones. Create something passionate, something people will line up in the streets for.

Everywhere I look, the PalmOS is being forgotten. Software developers no longer want to put the resources into releasing Palm versions of their software. Why am I still here then? Why do I still use my Treo everyday? Because I am tied to the software, and the synchronization with Mac/Windows. This is the only arena Palm has done right since the very first Palm all those years ago. Thousands of syncable applications, many of them run on mac as well. Despite Missing Sync’s best efforts for other platforms, the Palm is still the best syncable smart phone.

Anyway, rant over, my thoughts on the Centro? Impossibly small keyboard. It took me twice as long to type out a message than on my 680, only because i was hitting more than one key at a time. The lack of the new Phone application is also shocking. When questioned about this, Palm reps claimed that was a GSM exclusive feature. Since when is a more functional home screen a network dependency? Other than that, the integrated IM client is a welcome feature, but not at all revolutionary. Palm, please tell me you have something more for the palm faithful…