Palm Launches The Centro in India

Palm has introduced the glacier white Palm Centro smartphone in India, with voice, text, email, web, contact and calendar capabilities, a full-color touch screen and full keyboard.
"The combination of keyboard, touch screen and Palm's trademark ease of use makes Centro intuitive and easy to use for staying in touch," said Olivier Rozay, Palm's regional director for Asia Pacific. "Consumers who are thinking about stepping up to a smartphone will find Centro the perfect first choice – it's rich in features but also comes in a small, cool design."
With a new compact design, Centro is the smallest and lightest Palm phone to date, comes with Palm OS by ACCESS, and offers all the organizer functionalities that Palm offers.
The Centro features a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard, with key features such as one-touch speakerphone, conference calling and Bluetooth connectivity. It keeps all conversations in a chat-style view, just like Instant Messaging, so users can see the entire conversation unfold. Personal email, such as Gmail and Yahoo!, is simple to access right out of the box, while Microsoft Direct Push Technology gives users access to their corporate email.



In addition to usual smartphone capabilities, Centro is highly customizable with thousands of applications available.The full keyboard and touch screen provide quick access to online information and allow users to directly feed their personal blogs. Pocket Tunes on Centro lets users "sideload" songs and manage music, audio books and videos easily. Users can also shoot pictures or videos with the built-in digital camera and share them with friends.The Palm Centro smartphone is available now at a recommended retail price of Rs. 13,990 (inclusive of tax) and will be distributed through Brightstar Telecom India Pvt Ltd., the national distributor. Centro will be available in IT retail stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Pune and Chandigarh.Source

More UMPCs from Gigabyte at CeBit 08

We already reported about Gigabyte launching the M700 UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) -- at Cebit 08. Close on the heels of the M700 come two more devices in this category: the compact 4.8-inches MID (Mobile Internet Device) M528, and the full-function 7-inches UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) M704.
The Gigabyte M528 has a compact footprint and an elegant design. It features a 4.8-inches LCD monitor, built-in three mega pixels camera for photography, and 300K pixels camera for video conferencing. In addition, users can connect to the Internet, and send and receive emails as well as instant messages in time using the M528's wireless communication function. The MID has a QWERTY slide-out keyboard which is useful in fast text input. It also has a built-in GPS satellite positioning system. The M528 is built around Intel's Menlow platform with the CPU running at 800 MHz. It has 512MB of RAM and 8GB of Solid State storage. Along with its built-in Wi-Fi module, the M528 weighs around 340 grams. It sports a price tag of around $600 (approx Rs 24,000). The other launch, the M704, is the bulkier of the two but still qualifies as a UMPC. It feels tad heavier than its 780 grams of weight and comes with a 7-inches touch-screen LCD monitor. The built-in 1.3 mega pixels camera, in conjunction with the snapshot hotkey, enhances photography, while the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi module allows users to surf the Internet, receive and send emails, have video conferences, and use GPS without limitation anywhere, making the product well suited for personal entertainment and business applications. At the heart of the M704 is a VIA ULV-C7 CPU running at 1.2 GHz with 256K L2 cache. The device is equipped with 768MB 533MHz DDR-2 memory. The 7-inches TFT LCD is capable of displaying resolutions up to 1024 x 600 pixels. Unlike the Gigabyte M528 or the Asus Eee PC for that matter, the Gigabyte M704 has a 60GB 1.8 hard drive for storage. It's powered by a two-cell battery that claims to last for four hours of standard usage. This device is expected to ship for around $800 (approx Rs 32,000).
Though both these portable PCs will have their own set of buyers, I don't think either of them would give the Asus Eee PC sleepless nights.Source