Palm introduced a smartphone with a new firebrand aimed at a immature audience on Thursday .
The Centro speech sound will cost $ 99.99 and ab initio be available exclusively from Sprint Nextel starting in mid - October .
Palm designed the phone to be flashy , small and dewy-eyed to expend in an effort to flesh out the smartphone market , said Ed Colligan , Palm ’s president and CEO , during a webcast intelligence group discussion at the DigitalLife group discussion in New York City .
In the U.S. this year , he expects that of the 160 million phones sell , just 8 million will be smartphones . The mass market is n’t grease one’s palms smartphones today because they ’re bragging , complex , have clunky designs and are expensive , he said .
“ This is not an iPhone sea wolf , ” Colligan state . TheiPhone , with its high-pitched monetary value tag , appeals to the relatively humble existing smartphone market , while Palm is aiming the Centro at the large feature - phone segment .
The Centro should attract people who traditionally would buy a basic feature film earpiece but now want the second generation , he said . “ It ’s small enough that it competes with the standard feature of speech speech sound and it gives the full king of essentially a Treo , ” he tell .
College students , youthful professionals and “ chief operating officer of family ” are the type of the great unwashed Palm design the Centro for , he said .
The phone runs the Palm OS and operates on Sprint ’s 3 G net . It features a touch screen and a full keyboard and come stretch with clamant electronic messaging applications from Yahoo , AOL and Windows Messenger . It also includes push vitamin E - ring armor from corporate Microsoft Exchange servers .
While sales of Palm ’s Treo smartphone personal credit line have been firm , the party continues to struggle to record net profit gains . It face stiff contention from the entrenched BlackBerry , other Windows Mobile smartphones and new entrants like the iPhone .
Palm recently stumbled by announcing a smartphone companion gimmick , the Foleo , and then resolve to kill the product just before it was due to ship after much manufacture criticism of the concept . Palm said it plans to rise the product in the future .
Palm is developing a new operating system that it expects to bring out next year . It presently sells phone free-base on its existing software package as well as Windows Mobile .
