Millionth Centro sold – can Palm Inc still survive the smartphone race?
By Erna Mahyuni
Palm Inc.’s Centro just might be the little smartphone that could – Palm’s sold 1 million units of the $99 phone. Aiming for consumers who wanted more features at an affordable price, the Centro was an ideal starter smartphone and it seems Palm’s little gamble was worth it.
They weren’t slow at announcing their success either, sending off releases to a host of news sites including Yahoo! Finance, with quotes like these: “The Palm Centro is flying off the shelves because users who want to step up to a smartphone see it as the perfect first choice,” said Brodie Keast, senior vice president of marketing for Palm, Inc. “It has everything a person needs to stay organized and connected with everyone who is important to them. We’re very excited about the Centro’s near-instant popularity in the U.S. and think it’s going to be a huge hit as it continues to make its way across the globe.”
Near-instant popularity? The Centro was shipped all the way back in October, though it was first launch as a Sprint-exclusive in September, and only made available on AT&T February 19th. Its main selling point is its $99.99 pricetag, after carrier contract requirements and rebates.
A budget smartphone pretty much fills in the cracks for Palm, whose traditional target market are the mobile power users – executives who can afford to pay good money for their Treo range. The Centro packs in Bluetooh, HSDPA and EV-DO connectivity as well as integrated E-Mail, IM (MSN, Yahoo!, AOL) and the stable though hardly cutting-edge Palm OS 5.4.9. They even threw in a camera and a host of software that includes Google Maps, Pocket Tunes Deluxe and the Professional Edition of DataViz’s Documents to Go.
The Centro is now available in more than 10 countries, including Hong Kong, Singapore, India, the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, France and Italy. With smartphones projected to account for up to 35 percent of all mobile sales in the US by 2011 (says the IDC), Palm’s got quite the offering to beat.
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April 3rd, 2008
I like Centro, it was launched in India only a few days back. However I am not sure why they haven’t yet cut a deal with CDMA operators and launched its CDMA version as well. Also there is simply no color choice available for GSM Centro.