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Palm Expands Centro Color Pallette for AT&T

Over a month ago, AT&T started offering Palm's Centro smartphone, which until then had been a Sprint exclusive. At first, AT&T only offered Centro in "glacier white" with a dash of green to highlight its numeric keypad. Today, the carrier started offering its edition of the popular smartphone in what Palm's calling "obsidian black."

AT&T is selling Centro for $100 with a 2-year contract and after a mail-in rebate. Unlimited e-mail and data access is available for $30 a month with AT&T's PDA Personal data package and a corresponding voice plan.

Centro is the first Palm OS device to support certain AT&T-specific wireless services, such as XM Radio Mobile, Push to Talk and MusicID.

While AT&T's Centro is very similar to the version offered by Sprint, it is missing one important ingredient. Unlike Sprint's Centro, the AT&T edition does not support 3G cellular-wireless networking. So while you can speedily surf the Web, stream multimedia and download content to Centro on CDMA-carrier Sprint's EV-DO 3G network, the same can't be said for GSM-operator AT&T.

Rather, Centro tops out at AT&T'S 2.5G EDGE network, which is far slower than the carrier's UTSM/HSPDA counterpart to Sprint's EV-DO network. The reason for this disparity is, apparently, the lack of support for GSM-style 3G in the Palm OS.

As with Sprint's Centro, AT&T's is small and light at 4.22 x 2.11 x .73 inches (10.7 x 5.4 x 1.8 centimeters) and 4.4 ounces (119 grams). Even so, it sports a 2.2-inch, 320 x 320 pixel resolution touch screen and a full, if tiny, QWERTY thumb-keyboard.

There's also a microSD slot for memory expansion—for up to an additional 4GB of storage on top of Centro’s 64MB of RAM—Bluetooth wireless for personal area networking (i.e. connecting to a PC, a headset, car kit, etc.), a 1.3 megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom for taking pictures and video, and a 1150mAh-removable battery.

Palm Expands Centro Color Pallette for AT&T



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