Following up on my previous smartphone post, I’ve been using the Centro for over a month now and find it to be a pretty solid upgrade from the Treo 650. I’ll try to keep this brief and just lay out the pros and cons of the switch.
Pros:
- After a call ends, the elusive “Do you want to add this contact?” dialogue stays on the screen for more than 250 milliseconds. In fact, it stays there long enough for you to actually do something with it
- Text messaging is much less buggy in terms of the coloring of incoming/outgoing messages
- The device seems to wake up when it’s supposed to, unlike the Treo which would randomly “oversleep”
- Includes some decent apps without extra cost: VersaMail, PocketTunes, and a few games
- Broadband… woohoo!
- Phone is smaller, lighter, and I can still use the keyboard
- Played an hour-long podcast on the speaker phone and didn’t see much dent in the battery life
Cons:
- The stylus is a flimsy piece of garbage; you’ll want to buy one with a little more substance
- Rebooting the device requires you to remove the battery instead of using the stylus to hit a reset button
- Battery life isn’t so hot; if you’re waiting in the doctor’s office or something, you’ll find that browsing the web or playing games will have you running low for the rest of the day. On a related note, this amuses me – extend your battery life by adding a bunch of bulk
- An oddity: at one of our offices I apparently sit right at the borderline where the phone can’t decide to be on a Verizon or “Extended” Network. The end result is that the phone is laggy and the battery drains heavily
- There is an annoying 3-5 second pause after you hit the “hangup” button after phone calls
- Even with an unlimited data plan, you still have to pay extra for text messages. I hate cell phone companies so much.
All and in all, a great upgrade. I’d be a lot happier if the whole cell phone industry wasn’t designed to screw the consumer, but hopefully that will get better in time. Perhaps in a couple of years the Openmoko or Android phones will be ready for primetime.