Black Palm Centro on Sprint.com, red one coming soon
Just a heads up that Palm's new Centro phone is now available for purchase on Sprint's website for $99 with a new contract, $399 without. — The black version is the only one available for now, but the red version will be available on November 4th.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Centro's retail debut closes the loop on the official product shots that leaked in late August, turning Palm's smallest, cheapest Treo-derived design into a shipping product on Sprint.com at $99 with a two-year contract, or $399 unsubsidized. Only the black unit is live today; Palm has confirmed the red variant lands November 4th.
The timing matters because Palm arrives at this launch bruised: the company posted its first quarterly loss in three years in early October, cancelled the Foleo companion device before it shipped, and has repeatedly pushed back the next-generation operating system it told developers about in September. In the interim, Palm has been leaning on Windows Mobile hardware like the Treo 500v for Vodafone in Europe — making the $99 Centro its clearest bid for volume while its own platform slips.
First-order effects
- Sprint gains a sub-$100 smartphone for its lineup, giving the carrier a low-commitment entry point for customers who would otherwise buy a feature phone, while Palm gets a mass-market hardware channel during the gap before its delayed next-generation OS ships.
Second-order effects
- The $99-with-contract price point forces Palm's carrier partners and rival handset makers to treat subsidized pricing as the competitive floor for smartphone adoption, and the red variant's November 4th arrival signals a deliberate push beyond Palm's traditional business buyer into the youth and consumer segments where color options matter.
Third-order effects
- If carrier subsidy keeps pulling smartphone prices toward feature-phone territory, the market structurally shifts from enterprise-led adoption to consumer contract upgrades — a transition Palm is explicitly betting on, since its near-term strategy depends on cheap hardware volume carrying it until new software arrives.
The trend: Carrier subsidies are pushing smartphones below the $100 threshold, turning them from executive tools into mass-market contract devices just as Palm needs that volume to bridge its software transition.