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But the quad-band handset that cost $100 in the US is available to UK consumers for almost four times that, retailing - without contract - at £199. US buyers also had a choice of colours; the UK gets black.

Running the dated Palm OS software, the smartphone has a 320x320 colour screen, hard qwerty

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keyboard, Bluetooth but no Wi-Fi and 64MB of built-in available storage that can be expanded to 4GB via a microSD card. For another £70 you could get an iPhone.

Introduced in the US last September, the Centro has proved a huge success, according to Palm chef executive Ed Colligan.

"It's exceeding our expectations," he said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "We started going after a very different market with this device. An early survey of buyers shows that 72% of people who bought the Centro previously had a traditional handset and not a smart phone."

For more information see the Centro pages on Palm's UK website.