SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct 14, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — With the holidays just around the corner, Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) today announced that the Palm(R) Centro(TM) smartphone for Sprint will be available in two new soft-touch colors — Olive green and Vibrant rose. With twice the storage, Facebook(R) for Palm(1), and Google Maps with the My Location feature(2) all wrapped up in new colors at a special holiday price — as low as $79.99(3) — the Centro for Sprint makes the perfect ready-to-go gift. The new colors will join the popular Onyx black Centro in Sprint’s holiday lineup.

“We’re seeing fashion designers gravitate toward olive and rose tones, as forecasted in the PANTONE Fashion Color Reports for Fall 2008 and Spring 2009,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute(R). “Olive green and Vibrant rose are both strong fashion colors, offering a sense of sophistication and elegance. These hues are classic colors, with the longevity to translate from season to season.”

The new rich tones of Olive green and Vibrant rose feature a soft-touch finish that feels smooth and comfortable in the hand. Centro has a sleek, lightweight design with rounded corners, and it’s small enough to carry in a pocket — yet it retains Palm’s signature color touch screen and full keyboard, with comfortable gel-soft keys that make typing fast and easy.

The holidays are always a busy time, and Centro lets users keep in touch with friends and family with voice, text, IM, email, web(1) — even using Facebook for Palm, which is pre-installed on the new Centro holiday colors. Facebook for Palm lets users connect with friends, respond to messages, upload photos and videos, receive status updates, browse friends’ profiles and send out new friend requests — all right from their Centro.(1) And with Google Maps’ new My Location feature, Centro knows where the user is and what’s close by, so customers can find nearby restaurants, get directions, or see updated traffic reports.(2)

Users can shoot pictures or videos and send them to friends(1), or use the built-in MP3 player and take tunes to go. The new Olive green and Vibrant rose Centro smartphones have 128MB of available memory (twice the storage of the original Centro for Sprint) and the ability to add up to 4GB more with a microSD card (sold separately), so there’s plenty of room for playlists, photos and videos. Users can also watch Sprint TV channels, such as CNN mobile, FOX Sports, The Weather Channel and Disney Channel.(1)

New Centro Accessories

Palm also is introducing several custom-designed Centro accessories that are simple and lightweight:

– Centro Side Case — This smart and elegant leather side case has white stitching, smooth microfiber lining to help protect the phone, a magnetic closure and an attached belt clip. Available Nov. 2 online from the Palm Store (http://store.palm.com).

– Centro Leather Flip Case — The new Centro leather flip case lets users access Centro’s touch screen, keyboard and buttons while it’s snapped safely inside the case. It flips open for talking and using the phone, and comes with an array of liner and stitching colors to choose from — black, green, rose or blue. Available Nov. 2 online from the Palm Store.

– Vehicle Power Adapter — The new vehicle power adapter for Centro is small and sleek, and includes a USB-to-microUSB cable and a multi-connector adapter (microUSB to multi-connector). Available in November online from the Palm Store.

Pricing and Availability

The Olive green and Vibrant rose Centro smartphones will be available as early as Oct. 19 at select retail locations, and beginning Nov. 2 in Sprint Stores, consumer and business sales channels, and online at www.sprint.com/Centro and the Palm Store (http://store.palm.com). The new colors will be available for a special promotional price — as low as $79.99 with a two-year subscriber agreement and $100 mail-in rebate and $25 or higher data add-on or Everything plan with data(3) — through Jan. 10, 2009.

NOTE: Multimedia materials are available from Business Wire at http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5800839.

About Palm, Inc.

Palm, Inc. is a leading mobile products company, creating instinctive yet powerful mobile products that enable people to better manage their lives on the go. The company’s products for consumers, mobile professionals and businesses include Palm(R) Treo(TM) and Centro(TM) smartphones and Palm handheld computers, as well as software, services and accessories.

Palm products are sold through select Internet, retail, reseller and wireless operator channels throughout the world, and at Palm online stores ( http://www.palm.com/store).

More information about Palm, Inc. is available at http://www.palm.com.

The Windows Mobile 6 Professional software means a touch-screen is present and versions of Microsoft Word and Excel are built in for document reading and editing. Yet the P750 takes a phone-like approach to its looks, being tall and thin like many candybar-style mobile phones.

There is a number pad beneath the screen rather than a cramped QWERTY keyboard, and while this means you can’t tap out text at lightning fast speeds, you can use either the on-screen tappable keyboard or the number pad for text entry, the latter T9 style.

There is a scroll wheel on the left side for sweeping through menus and screens of information, and a Hold button on the right side for deactivating all the various buttons and the wheel when the P750 is in your pocket.

The P750 is a 3G device with HSDPA support, and a front-facing camera takes care of two-way video calling. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a GPS antenna are all built in, and you get a utility that can send your GPS position to up to five SMS recipients at the same time. Another utility saves your GPS route as a file you can upload to Google Maps. If you want point-to-point navigation you’ll have to add in some third party software, though.

Other bundled software includes a business card reader that uses photos of cards taken with the 3-megapixel main camera and converts their text into a contact book entry. You also get software that can show you the current time in up to three countries in the world; handy if you need to plan a phone call. Other additional software includes an RSS reader and a graphics-based replacement for the Windows Mobile Today screen.

There is even an area of memory set aside that you can password protect so you can store stuff you don’t want others to see. If you want more eulogising, then the battery life proved to be very good during testing.

The absence of a miniature keyboard might irritate those keen on mobile e-mail, and the tiny joystick that sits under the screen is not our ideal: we prefer a standard, flat navigation pad. But overall this is an extremely well featured device.

Asus is probably best know for its laptop offerings, but the Taiwanese giant is nothing if not prolific and has its fingers in about as many technology industry pies as you can think of, from motherboards to servers. It has also been active in the highly competitive mobile devices space and now we have its latest smartphone, the P526, in for review.

It runs on the latest version of Microsoft’s mobile platform - Windows Mobile 6 Professional - and as smartphones go, it’s a bit of a looker. There’s no glossy black plastic, candy red backlit keys, heat-sensitive keys or funky, ‘innovative’ design. It is, however, one of the slimmer smartphones around at just 16mm, it’s very light at 115g, its grey plastic chassis is chrome-trimmed and it even comes with a smart grey leatherette case to protect the screen, and the overall effect is very pleasing on the eye. It’s smart but unassuming, a bit like a well-tailored suit.

It’s hardly surprising to find that there’s no QWERTY keyboard here given how slim the P526 is. Instead there’s a number pad under the screen, and the one here is an excellent example. The buttons have a slightly curved profile and are separated from each other making it exceptionally easy to dial numbers manually, and there are a few other nice touches to the control system too. Apart from the usual Windows soft keys and pick-up/hang-up combination there are also short cut buttons for the Windows Start menu and one to activate the Voice Commander software. Below the pick-up key is a button that is initially designated as a quick application launch key, but can be reassigned as a task switch button, allowing you to cycle quickly through open applications.

The good news continues. Along the right hand edge, alongside a memory expansion slot for microSD cards and the trigger button for the two megapixel digital camera, is a dedicated lock switch. It has long been a pet hate of mine with Windows Mobile that in order to lock and unlock the keys and touchscreen on most devices, you have to prod a couple of tiny on-screen buttons. It’s not my idea of sensible user interface design. With the P526, however, that’s a thing of the past. Just flick the switch and it’s locked; flick it again and it’s unlocked. I wish more phones would do something similar.

At the GPS navigation fair organized by Navtek, Asus has presented its first GPS PDA mobile phone, the GSM and GPRS tri-band P535, with SIRF III GPS chip and integrated receiver and antenna. Unlike the Asus P525, the device doesn’t have a keypad, but compensates with a 2.8 inch TFT LCD screen with 65k colors and a 320×240 resolution.

The P535 has a Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, and thus, will be able to run all the applications compatible with it. The OS runs on an Intel Xscale 520 Mhz processor, with the help of 256 MB ROM and 64 MB RAM memory, expandable through the miniSD memory card slot. The mobile has Bluetooth 2.0, EDR and Wi-Fi 802.11g connectivity, but the absence of the EDGE technology makes it an almost sure victim for the HTC P3300, its direct competitor. It also has a 2 megapixel camera, a 1300 mAh lithium battery, helping it to be as portable as it can be, with its 150 grams weight, and a Destinator 6 navigation software.

Ryan at Engadget says they’ve been chatting up one of the divinely chosen to lay eyes on the second-gen iPhone, and they’re claiming a couple details we haven’t heard before, as well as the by-now familiar: 3G and real GPS—expected, and hoped for. Metal backing out, glossy black is in, with chrome volume buttons, which should help with signal issues. It’s also a little fatter (probably cause of GPS and battery, which still isn’t removable) but you can toss your stupid headphone adapter. The screen is the same size and res (we’d heard they were trying to move to plastic, but doesn’t seem to be the case). He’s guessing it could ship in July. Update: To be clear, neither us nor Engadget were claiming that this is an actual pic, just illustrative (besides, it’s a few weeks old, see the in-body link). [Engadget]