A blackberry (pick a number) is a great phone. A stable, dependable phone.

The Centro, however, is a d e v i c e -not a “phone”. The Blackberry is a tricked-out mobile phone but the Centro -a mini computer system, with phone capabilities -as a side benefit.

In truth, a pain-in-the-neck though it can be, you can do things with the Palm Centro that you couldn’t begin to do, with a Blackberry anything or even most phones for that mattter -including the boastful iphone.

I believe the Blackberry to be a more stable phone, but there’s nothing you can put in it to make it able to take at least 5 pictures, layer them one on top of the other, cut away the parts you don’t want from each layer, adjust color, merge the pics together and then upload it to wherever you want. A mere phone can’t do that. You can’t install anything in a blackberry to make it able to do that. It’s a phone.

With a Centro running the right software, you can record a sound, take that sound and create different versions of it by adding effects redrawing it, cutting it, reversing it and so on, build a composition with it and then render that composition as a CD quality wave file to add to your playlist.

It’s just ridiculous what the Palm Centro can do in the right hands, with the right software. Software, that simply isn’t available, for a Blackberry.

You simply cannot compare a sports car, with a helicopter. No matter how much “better” the new sporty phones are, the old Palm based devices can take you places that most “phones”, simply cannot go.

This leads into the next big question: What exactly do you want to do with what you would get?

I think people who are looking for ease of use with a limited learning curve would do best with a Blackberry. People looking for a digital utility knife, would do better with a Centro.

Centro User