Up and downs in the life of a Centro

Just over nine months ago, I got my first Palm Centro, shortly after it came out on Sprint. It was just what I was looking for, and fortunately my phone from work was with Sprint. Unfortunately, I’m now on my fourth.

When I switched jobs back in May, I had to get my own cell account with Sprint. Well, work would have done it for me, but I wanted it in my own name for a few reasons… I don’t want to have to switch again unless I want to (not that I plan on leaving this job in the foreseeable future), and I figured after some of the junk I’ve been through the last couple years it is one way to help re-establish my credit again.

So everything was hunkey-dorey until about a month ago. The on/off button, the home button and a couple others in the middle bar cluster started acting funny, and then stopped working entirely, including the middle select button of the nav-ring. Which meant I couldn’t unlock my phone to make a call! This all happened in a span of about 36 hours. So I made a quick trip to a Sprint store near work and told them of my plight. The kids (not sure if any of them were out of High School yet or not) took a look at it and couldn’t find a reason for why the phone wasn’t working. Fortunately, I had signed up for the full montey of protection plans for my phone. I’m not sure what I wouldn’t be covered for, but fortunately I was covered for this. Unfortunately, they were not going to just swap me for a new phone. This meant I was going to be stuck with a broken phone for 3-5 business days. Yay.

At least we got it where I could turn the auto-lock off so I could make calls.

A couple days later, they call me and the replacement phone is in, so I go swap it, and yay. I have a working phone again. At least for a couple weeks.

The day before I am heading out to DC and Virginia, the on/off button stops working again. So you know that part of the pre-flight chat where they tell you to turn off all phones, pagers, etc. Well, I couldn’t.  I could still turn the phone “on” when it went to sleep, just hit one of the other buttons, then the unlock button. So that wasn’t a huge issue to deal with over the weekend. But then on Sunday evening, things really started getting strange. My phone kept trying to hot-sync, even though I wasn’t connected to anything, and hadn’t done anything to tell it to hot-sync. I could sort of cancel, make a phone call or something, but soon as I turned my back, the phone would go in to repetive hot-sync mode again.

I kept the phone plugged in all night Sunday, but the battery was almost dead by the time I got to the airport that afternoon. When I got to the Jeep, I tried plugging it in, and it said it was charging, but even though I had it plugged in for the ride home and put it on the charger when I got home, Tuesday morning it was ka-put.

I had done some searching online, but couldn’t find any info on anyone having a problem like this. I must just be lucky. So Tuesday, I get up and head to the Sprint store near my house, drop it off for them to look at and head next door to Chipotle for some lunch (breakfast really). When I returned, they said they couldn’t figure out what was up, they couldn’t even get it to turn on. So while I’m pretty sure I just got a reconditioned unit last time, this time they were giving me one right out of the box (minus the cords and stuff that I didn’t bring with me of course).  It has been a week now, and I’ve uncrossed my fingers at this point and not seen any issues popping up. I going to put this behind me and just hope I simply had a run of bad luck.

One thing I found out over the weekend and am in the middle of doing now is upgrading the core software from Palm. It is supposed to give better mail performance, better IM performance, and probably most importantly allow me to use the “I’m here!” feature on Google Maps.

After a 20meg download I started the update process, and it was pretty straight forward. It takes about 15 minutes, and goes through a series of hard-resets during that time (so make sure you Sync before doing this!), and then I had to hot-sync to restore all my data and such. All in all, this was very painless.

The “I’m here!” is actually called “My Location”. There’s two versions, one uses GPS in the phone to pinpoint your location, the Sprint phones use cell-tower triangulation. While not as accurate, I just tried it and it’s got me at 53rd and Central, I’m actually at 50th and Central. The tower I’m pulling off of must be by Target up the road. It is supposed to show my location with 1800 meters, not too bad. Will come in handy when wanting to pull up directions to a job site, or meeting location.

I’m still very happy, overall, with the Centro. I’m hoping this button issue was just a fluke - cause I admit, in a fit of frustration last week I was actually considering looking at another phone. We’ll see how it goes I guess.