Centro: Traveler's Dream

[From Mike Beebe, Webster, NY] So, about my new Palm Centro. I just LOVE this little phone, and it was particularly useful this past week while on vacation. Visiting San Francisco for the first time, the Centro proved itself invaluable. Yelp and Open Table worked like a charm on the device and the preloaded Google Maps kept us from getting lost more than once. (IF only they would have had Transit Maps functional for the Palm version...bah.) The Centro's cross application functionality was especially cool. Just tapping on a phone number on yelp.com from within the browser brings up a dial prompt to call the number. Brilliant! (Maybe this is old hat for other smartphone users, but it's new to me...and really cool.) Never having been to SF before, these were great tools for tracking down great food in whatever neighborhood we happened to be in at the time.

There are some great apps out there for getting around too. Continental (the airline Expedia routed us through) has a standalone flight schedule timetable and both the CalTrain and Bay Area Rapid Transit have FREE apps for the train riders in SF. The BART program was particularly well done, with fares, reverse trips, a transit map and the ability to save favorite routes. (I actually first saw the Continental app here at Palmaddicts...thanks!)

The built in Blazer web browser was just OK, but I was able to stay on top of Gmail just fine as well as setting those fantasy baseball lineups on Yahoo!'s mobile portal. And of course, Sudoku and some other great games (mostly discovered through Palmaddicts as well) made those cross-country flights much more bearable. Plus I found that since the Centro looks more like a PDA than a phone the flight attendants didn't make a stink about using my phone while in flight.

And of course the camera and camcorder were great for sending pics (including a shot of some folks waiting for their new iPhones at the Apple Store in Union Square two blocks away, photo attached) and videos of the sights back to the kids stuck back at home in boring Upstate New York. It was bound to be a great vacation no matter what, but the Centro just made things that much better.

Thanks Palmaddict for all the tips, and thanks to Verizon for getting this great phone.