Palm recently announced that the popular Centro smartphone is getting a release in Australia, via Telstra, the country's largest mobile operator. The Centro will be available for 299 Australian dollars (about 287 USD), starting May 26 - apparently only for the Pre-Paid customers of Telstra.

Centro is the smallest smartphone unveiled by Palm until now and it was created to answer the needs of those who want smartphone-like features in a device that doesn't cost too much. Among the handset's features we have a full QWERTY keyboard that makes text entry an easy and quick thing to do, a square TFT touchscreen display with 320 x 320 pixels and support for 65K colors, quad-band GSM / GPRS / EDGE connectivity, document viewer and editor (for Office and PDF files), Google Maps, organizer, email, Blazer 4.5 browser, Music player, Bluetooth, a 1.3 Megapixel camera with video recording, 64MB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot supporting cards of up to 4GB. The Centro runs on Palm 5.4.9 OS, weighs 124 grams and measures 107 x 53.5 x 18.6 millimeters.

"As the first provider of this unique smartphone in Australia, Telstra is demonstrating its commitment to giving customers the best choice of Pre-Paid products and services", said Ross Fielding, executive director, Telstra Product Management, talking about the upcoming availability of the Centro.

Since its September 2007 release (only in the US at that time), Palm Centro was sold in more than 1 million units all around the world, which means it's a device that offers a pretty good price-value balance.

Starting the date mentioned at the beginning of the article, Australian users will find the Telstrian Centro in a single color version, Glacier White, on Telstra's website as well as via the carrier's retail stores and dealers across the (vast and desert-y) country.