Friday, March 14, 2008

Palm Centro - one day on

I've had the Centro 36 hours now, so are my first impressions (post below) still the same? Well, yes and no.

On the positive side, I love the form factor and look of the device. I was very iffy about the look when I saw initial pictures on the Centro on the web, buut it kind of grows on you, and it actually is a very nice device to look at and hold. And because it's a Palm device, it's easy to use.

On the negative side though, I've found three things in my short time with the device.
  1. Resets: Let's face it, the OS hasn't changed so there's no reason to have believed this old chestnut would have been dealt with. But you like to think it would have wouldn't you? No.
    This morning I had about 6 resets on the bounce - granted it was trying to do the same thing over again. And that was....? Trying to open, edit or read a particular RSS feed in Quick News, my Palm RSS feedreader of choice. It was only one feed - all the others worked fine, so maybe it was a corrupt feed, but it was one I had imported from my Treo and which had worked fine on that device. In frustration and uttering a few choice words, I deleted the whole QN application and will try again at a later date.
  2. Email: Basically the email app seems to have been given a minor upgrade. The config screens have altered a bit from the Treo and you've got that Vista like spinning circle instead of the progress bar -which I preferred, because it gave you an isntantaneous "downloading n of N" type message whereas in this new iteration you don't know how many emails there are coming until they're all down. But worse, the whole download process has slowed to a crawl. It's much slower than on the Treo and even slower than on my Windows Mobile HTC S710. Why make something worse in a new device that worked perfectly well before. I'm a registered Snappermail user though rarely used that app, but I might try it now to see if it's quicker than the default app. Bummer.
  3. Touchscreen: It might just be me and that toothpick like stylus on the Centro, but the touchscreen doesn't seem as responsive as on the Treo. A bit more pressure and precision needed.
  4. Talking of the stylus: Thin, bendy bit of plastic, good as a toothpick. I've noticed Expansys are awaiting a 3rd party stylus which they're expecting in a week or two, which might be a good "upgrade".
However. I'm a Palm user. I come to expect these things. I still prefer the OS over WM, and posisbly some of my reset problems might be sue to a corrrupted file or stuffing too many 3rd party apps on without checking to see which one might cause problems first. I've already added a couple of games, Undupe, Diddlebug, GroupSMS messaging, ewallet and KeyCaps any one of which might be the reset culprit rather than QuickNews.

I still love it to bits and I'm glad I bought it.

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