Interview with Palm's Stephanie Richardson

Here is a picture of Palm's Stephanie Richardson, Product Marketing Manager for the Centro, on the right. Along with her, on the left, is Palm's PR representative Dolleen Casey, who helped set up the interview.

Stephanie says that the Centro's battery life is 3 1/2 talk hours and 10 days standby. I asked her who did the design of the product. In other words, did Palm just do the "look and feel" design or did it do more. Stephanie said that for a product like this, which is taking Palm in a new direction, Palm not only did the industrial design, but actually did the electrical hardware design as well. Palm felt it was important to have full control over the complete hardware and software design process so that they could achieve exactly what they wanted. Some of their other phones have used an ODM for design, but not this one.

Why no WiFi? Stephanie says that with the Sprint EVDO network WiFi is just not necessary and they didn't feel the need for it. I forgot to mention in my earlier post that the Centro is 3G and takes advantage of Sprint's high speed network. Stephanie demonstrated calling up some websites with Blazer on the 3G network, and I must say that I was impressed. It seemed as fast as my WiFi at home. 3G is not available in my part of New Jersey so I've never seen it before. They may have a point here. Of course, in tests I've seen on other sites 3G really seems to suck down battery life quickly - but so does WiFi.

The Centro uses the same core code as the 680 as far as the Palm OS goes. I asked her about Linux and the future of the PDA part of Palm, but she didn't feel she could comment as these were out of her area. Sprint has an exclusive for 90 days from the date of availability. (So maybe we'll see the phone on other networks. My speculation, not hers.) "No comment" on whether there will be a GSM version.

I played around a bit with the phone and I have to say it has a very nice heft and feel. It doesn't feel plasticky or cheap and the keyboard seems quite usable for SMS and shorter emails, which is fine for the intended audience. If I needed a "business" phone I would definitely go for one of the Treo models. By the way, the Centro name, she says, was a deliberate intent to distinguish the phone from the Treo line and its business orientation.

That's it from the show. I'll take one more walk around and if I come across anything else I'll post it tonight when I get home.