There have been spy shots and leaked official photos, and now Sprint just made it official that the Palm Centro will find itself in someone's hot little hand on October 14 for a mere $99.99. And looky there, it's got a surprising color slathered onto it, too.
Just in case everyone is completely bored with everything Palm makes these days, the company painted up this pony in fire engine red, certain to excite those who wear red dresses on Fridays or maybe beasts that fight for their bovine lives in certain bullrings in Spain. Oh wait, red's called Garnet, but Palm Centro still comes in black, too. Anyway, the $100 price as after a $100 mail-in rebate, and you must sign up for $25 data plan. Small price for a small phone, with small features.
In case you're still interested in this trinket after that uncalled-for diatribe, the phone can handle email, text and IM messages, let's you listen to MP3s, can view Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, and it also has contacts and schedules on board. So hey, that's a lot of stuff inside this little phone; maybe its features aren't so tiny after all. [Sprint's Palm Centro site]
DISCUSSION
As the owner of a Treo 700p, I have to say that the lack of a touch screen on a Palm OS device seems like a bad idea. While it's true that there are a metric ass-load of applications for the Palm OS, an awful lot of the really useful ones (and even more of the completely free ones) haven't seen actual development in quite some time (hasn't been necessary, since the OS hasn't been changing), and thus haven't fully embraced 5-way navigation.
The result is that you have some apps that work great with 5-way nav, some apps that work mostly okay with 5-way nav, but are just wonky enough that you have to use the touch screen sometimes (AcidImage, for example), and some that don't use the 5-way nav at all, or for which the 5-way is so broken that the only logical solution is to use the touchscreen (HanDBase, I'm looking at you).
So, yeah, while I'd never trade my 700p for a Windows Mobile device, I'd hazard a guess that the lack of a touch screen is going to make it hard for the Centro to offer the kind of support for older Palm OS apps that it will need to compete with other low-end smartphones.