Now You Know Centro Book Released

Now You Know Centro BookA new entry entitled "Now You Know Palm Centro" in the previously-presumed dormant "Now You Know" series of Palm instructional books has quietly just hit the market. Amazon is already selling this book for $13.59, well below its SRP of $19.99 and ahead of the official release date of August 2nd.

The book is authored by Patrick Ames and published by technology and lifestyle publisher Peachpit Press. For a printed volume, the book appears to contain quite up-to-date information given the appearance of what is an unbranded Verizon Cobalt Blue Centro on the cover. This is the first volume focusing on the new entry-level Palm Centro. Ames is the author or co-author of all previous books in the Palm Press series.

An excerpt from the book's page on Peachpit's site:

This pocket-sized and portable guide comes jam-packed with new things you can do on your Centro that are not disclosed in the PDF manuals. Master one topic quickly and easily and then move on to the next because everything is a one-to-five minute tip or technique. Now You Know Centro is meant to be fast and simple, allowing you to practice on your handheld while you read.

Unfortunately, the book's cover does carry the unfortunate tagline that touts the Centro's ability to "…snap a pic of that hottie at the bar". This attempt at sophomoric humor comes off as an ill-advised attempt to attract the attention of hip young male playboys, especially in light of Ed Colligan's recent comments reinforcing Palm's effort to expand their customer demographics to a more diverse audience. At best, this tagline does not take into account the pitiful low-light performance of the Centro's 1.3 megapixel camera that is devoid of a built-in flash.

Traditionally, a new volume of the "Now You Know" series has been published on a semi-regular schedule for particularly popular or long-lived Palm Treos. The first book in the series, "Now You Know Zire" was published in April 2004 and focused on the Zire 31 and Zire 72 handhelds. Later in the year the first "Now You Know Treo" was released which focused on the Treo 600 and 650 smartphones. The third book, "Now You Know Treo 680" was released nearly two years later and focused specifically on the GSM Treo 680 but many of its tips also applied to the recently-released CDMA Treo 700p. The most recent book in the series, Now You Know Treo 700w, was released in January of 2007, oddly a year after that device's debut with Verizon Wireless.

Thanks PalmAddicts for the tip.

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Now you know Centro

palmdiva @ 7/31/2008 2:05:05 PM # Q
I received my copy from Amazon on Tuesday. Despite not being a palm novice (treo 600; 650; 680)' I always learn something new from these books. It's a great gift for any new palm smartphone user if theere is one for the model they own. Palm should just charge a few dollars more and include this book
RE: Now you know Centro
SeldomVisitor @ 7/31/2008 2:17:48 PM # Q
But is the customer set that buys the Centro INTERESTED in the Centro?

I bet not.

RE: Now you know Centro
palmit @ 7/31/2008 2:30:06 PM # Q
Ok, what are you trying to say? Those young kids who buy a Centro can't read books.



RE: Now you know Centro
PacManFoo @ 7/31/2008 4:27:34 PM # Q
Was it written in text message code?

The last known classic PDA user.
I've recently upgraded from a Palm TX to a Newton MP2000!
http://newtonpda.googlepages.com
RE: Now you know Centro
SeldomVisitor @ 7/31/2008 8:17:17 PM # Q
No, not that they CAN'T read, but that they don't WANT to read.

I can't think of anything MORE boring than reading a book about my phone.

And the customer set with which the Centro IS a hit is JUST that set of folks who couldn't care less about their phones - they're TOASTERS to those guys and gals - they aren't at ALL interested in reading a book about their phones, they just want to USE them.

IMHO, of course, but I'd bet real bucks I'm right.

==========

And...interestingly...this little thread suggests a phone that would ALSO be of interest to the same customer set.

First, it's a phone with what we consider standard stuff like contacts, calculator (*), etc, =hard-programmed=.

Then it can email and text message using a QWERTY keyboard.

Then it can browse and maybe do location stuff.

And be used with WiFi and Bluetooth, of course.

==============
And that's it.
==============

NOT programmable except maybe, say, via Java for the random game.

Good enough for the same group of buyers.

What was it Colligan said about =TREO OWNERS= and how much extra stuff they put on their phones? IOW...who needs it!?

-----

(*) I haven't used a calculator external to my house in something like at LEAST a decade. What am I doing wrong....


RE: Now you know Centro
SeldomVisitor @ 8/1/2008 6:40:31 AM # Q
The "Salt" one sounds fascinating!

Lol!

[and, of course, this BEGS the question on how you went about FINDING those particular books...interesting home library?]

RE: Now you know Centro
nastebu @ 8/1/2008 7:34:04 AM # Q
"Salt" is actually supposed to be pretty good. In the mid-1990s, after deconstruction, academics started writing very narrowly focused histories. Blame it on Michel Focault. My favorite one was the history of zero,

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seife/dp/0140296476

(none of the previous post was ironic in the least. Really. Not at all.)

RE: Now you know Centro
SeldomVisitor @ 8/1/2008 8:42:20 AM # Q
Ya know, I'm MUCH more interested in the history of negative one.

If ever there was a bogus concept, that's it.

Get rid of negative-one-think and all of a sudden all SORTS of interesting possibilities alight!

No more imaginary numbers!

Faster-than-speed-of-light anyone?

Kewl...

RE: Now you know Centro
joad @ 8/1/2008 12:42:19 PM # Q
Just head over to Salvation Army and pickup a used Palm Professional book from 1997 or so - 80% of what you need to know is contained in it. The rest you can get from the user's manual that Palm (thankfully) still prints instead of dumping onto a PDF.


Paying my annual PDA update tax to Palm since 1997.
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Gotta love Palm!

hkklife @ 7/31/2008 5:51:55 PM # Q
http://blog.palm.com/palm/2008/07/you-go-mobile-g.html

On the same day we post this piece on the new NYK Centro book and its unfortunate semi-misogynistic, male-pandering choice of cover text ("snap a pic of that hottie at the bar"), Palm updates their corporate blog with a bunch of pomp & circumstance about attracting female users. If this doesn't merit a "GIGGLE", I don't know what does!

"It also helps that smartphones like the Palm Centro are sleeker and sexier than ever before – coming in smaller form factors and a wide range of cool colors"

P.S. This is all garbage. I DEMAND a larger/higher-resolution screen in a non-Apple CDMA device. Everything else is pure fluff!

P.P.S. I can tell bawdy jokes, stories etc. with the best of 'em. But I'm not heading up anyone's marketing/PR campaign! And for a Palm-sanctioned/assisted book that's essentially a glorified user's manual, this is sending out one type of message that's in direct contrast to what the Centro is supposedly doing (broadening Palm's demographics/marketshare) & what Colligan & the Palm blog are preaching.

*******************************************************************

For a REAL blast from the past, let's turn the wayback machine to 1999 and Palm's controversial Palm V ad campaign....the one with the "nekkid" women-remember that one?

We've gone from at least some pseudo-intellectual mubbo-jumbo, art-for-art's sake, ad campaign from the heady tech bubble days (for the Palm V,a truly revolutionary device) espousing the elegance of the female form to THIS: simple barfly chatter for the 20-something/ADD generation/can't-afford-an-iPhone-yet/fratboy/playa mentality types targeted to sell Palm's dayglo-colored kiddie smartphone (Centro).

Doesn't Palm seem like a VERY unlikely choice to be repeatedly involved in sexist advertising scandals?

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/Porn/3Compalm.html

A choice excerpt:

Simply Bulls**t: 3Com Replies
Half the fun of a confrontation such as this is how the corporate talking heads reveal themselves after the fact. Here - if we had any doubt before - we learn that to 3Com women are merely objects, kind of like a bowl of fruit, to represent sex to sell their product to be used as a backdrop.

Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for your candid feedback on our advertising campaign for the Palm V organizer. Your comments are welcome and will be forwarded to our marketing team.
We would like to take this opportunity to clarify the Palm Computing position on this campaign.
The female image in the advertisement is designed to draw a parallel between the elegant design of the Palm V product and the elegance of the human form. We wanted to infer that great design involves both the aesthetics of an object as well as how that object functions or performs. In the case of the dancers image, the human form is the backdrop to the Palm V organizer and not the focus of the ad. The simplicity of the imagery and the "Simply Palm(superscript: TM)" headline are meant to reflect the simplicity that is the cornerstone of our product design philosophy and a key factor in our success.
There will be other ads in the "Simply Palm" series in upcoming months that will feature other beautiful objects to illustrate this same concept.
We hope this helps to put a context around the campaign. Again, thank you for sending us your comments


Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p

RE: Gotta love Palm!
joad @ 8/1/2008 12:47:41 PM # Q
From the rollout parties and such that Palm has had over the past few years, this "target audience" seems to have been in their eyesights all along, at the expense of those who really love and stick with their product.

Old techies requesting quality and continual improvement are boring and annoying to Palm - better to attract 20-year old NASCAR clones that mortgage their trailers to buy the "next best thing" and dump it within months (often before the issues requiring warranty assistance show up). Palm gets a few short-term customers, bleeds off their long-term ones, and goes belly-up when the Centro kids grow up and buy an iPhone.....


Paying my annual PDA update tax to Palm since 1997.

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