PalmOne Zire 71 Handheld

• Bright, 320x320 transflective TFT color display supports more than 65,000 colors
• Texas Instruments OMAP310 processor (ARM); 144 MHz
• Integrated digital camera with 640x480 resolution, auto exposure, and automatic white balance control
• SD expansion slot
• Zire 71 Handheld, Protective Carrying Case, USB HotSync Cradle, Power Adapter, Desktop Software CD-ROM, Software Essentials CD-ROM, Stylus

I Fried (Power Surge) my handspring Visor over the weekend and went to BestBuy with my "Service Protection Plan" They gave me full credit towards a new device ($...). I had to upgrade. My choice was between the Clie and the Zire ($... extra). The Zire won hands down. It's speed is fantastic, those of you who have older 33MHz chips will notice. The Colors are rich and bright and the interface is easy to use. Graffiti2 takes a little getting use to but it is easily mastered. The camera is just a neat addition, I mean it's not designed for professional photography. Thats what a 5megapixel digital camera is for. But it's great for taking little memory shots and having pictures of your kids available. And the device itself looks good too.

I do agree 16megs is a bit chincey esp when only 13megs is available for application usage. My biggest gripe is the carrying case. The Elastic is so tight that it sets off the joystick every time I insert it. I miss the hard plastic cover from my handspring. Palm could have given better protection than that. That's why it gets only 4 stars.

Anyone looking for an up grade from their old PDA would do well to steer in the direction PALM has taken. Top of the line device, though you may want to get a hard shell case to protect it.

Buy PalmOne Zire 71 Handheld Now

Despite Sony's slick Clies banging on their hood, Palm has not exactly been known to be very friendly in the bargain department. The Zire I at its low pricetag was an initiate's machine in the Low-Cost-Low-Features bracket. Surprise surprise -the Zire II, er, Zire 71 not only packs a full punch at 300 US$ but also ups the ante on multimedia handhelds!

THINGS TO NOTE:

1. Comes (finally) with OS 5.2 and its sharp fonts + cool icons/themes.

2. Sleek glossy blue skin

3. A light 5.3 ounces in weight

4. A 320x320 screen sporting 65,000 colors screen

5. An awesome VGA (640x480) digicam, but be prepared for a 1-2 second

delay in shutter click. To its credit though the viewfinder software appears very quickly.

6. A revamped PalmDesktop with a conveniently integrated photo-management module, which makes it a snap not only to load pictures onto your handheld, but also to view, organize, and even e-mail those you've taken with it. Also includes basic image-editing features like cropping, rotating, and red-eye reduction.

7. And the AudiblePlayer that enables you to listen to the huge library of spoken-word content from Audible.com

8. A better handwriting recognizing software Graffiti 2

9. A joystick type navigation "nipplehead"

10. Out of the box MP3 support (RealOne Mobile Player)

11. Above all, a snazzy "Kinoma Producer" software to produce movies specifically for your handheld, in 4 easy steps

CAVEATS:

1. No bluetooth (not that I'd need or use it but would have been cool. HP 5455 has both WiFi and BT!)

2. No With all this multimedia doohickey, a voice recorder wasn't much to throw in

3. Only a 16 MB of ram, kinda low for a device with this target market

4. Lack of a good screen cover

5. Digicam pics may be a little slow to save to memory

IN SUMMARY:

Despite the few minor grouses, a great offering from the Palm camp for entertainment junkies packing in mp3 player, audible player, movie player, camera and an Clie/iPaq type screen. May not be a great reason to upgrade if you already have a PDA, but if you are in the market for a new one, this is a superb buy.

Read Best Reviews of PalmOne Zire 71 Handheld Here

Just bought this Palm for a significant person in my life. Had the opportunity to prep it. The bright color screen is beautiful, and using the built-in camera can't get any easier. The screen feels a little slippery, and Graffiti 2, which still requires you to memorize some weird shorthands, takes some getting used to for people new to Graffiti and also old-time Palm users.

Overall I'm still impressed with Palm's simplicity and speed. And I appreciate the ability to sync with Outlook, using an included third-party app.

But I'm very disappointed in the way Palm implements multimedia functions. In this area, the Pocket PC is way simpler. Let me expound.

To play audio files (only MP3 and RealAudio are supported), you MUST purchase a secure digital expansion card. Of course, given the Zire 71 only has 13MB of user memory, you wouldn't fit too many MP3 songs in the internal RAM anyway if you could. But, still, it would have been nice to be able to carry two favorite songs with me without the SD memory. And had Palm chosen to license Microsoft's WMA technology, we could get the same sound quality at half the file size as standard MP3.

So you need to purchase an SD card, and then install RealOne Player from the 2nd companion CD. The choice of RealOne is not a blessing, because Real's software is totally invasive, even more so than Microsoft's. And copying MP3 files from your Windows desktop to the Zire is a total pain: first you have to create a playlist in RealOne, then specify which files in RealOne to copy, and finally copy. With Pocket PC, I just use Windows Explorer to go to the My Music directory on the Pocket PC, and then drag-and-drop MP3 and WMA files. (On the Mac, you'd use Hotsync, which makes it easier than on Windows. It puzzles me why Palm chose not to implement the same technique on Windows.)

To play video files, you'd need to install both the Kinoma Player and Quick Time. Then, each time you want to copy a file to the Zire, you must use Kinoma to convert the source file (AVI, MPEG and MOV are supported), a time-consuming process. This is true on both Windows and Mac. If you have a fast P4 the process is not as painful, but still it's totally unnecessary. Again, on the PPC, I just drop-and-drop video files into the My Documents folder (or a subfolder) and voila.

So if you are buying the Zire 71 for multimedia functionalities, hold off your purchase and wait until Palm improves this area. If you are buying it for snapping pictures, go for it.

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I just recieved a Palm Zire 71 as a birthday present. Previously I carried a "little black book" of names, addresses, email, phone numbers, etc.. Every few years it would fall apart from being carried everywhere. I planned on buying a bottom of the line PDA to replace my address book when my darling wife suprised me with the Zire 71.

First the good, the screen looks great! It's bright, colorful, and contrasty. My coworkers with older color Palm PDA's all covet it. I'm going to put lots of pictures of my daughter in my PDA and use it for my brag book instead of carrying a bunch of pictures in my wallet. The handwriting recognition is ok but what I like about it is that I can enter the data on my PC then sync it with the PDA. I entered hundreds of entries from my address book in a few hours (quicker than I could have copied them to another address book!). I've been going through game withdrawal ever since giving up my Nokia cell phone with snake (my top game was over 1,100). I downloaded Tetris on my PDA which is a lot more fun.

Now the bad, 16MB of RAM is a little stingy now that RAM [costs so little]. My first addition will be a memory expansion card. I wish the Zire 71 came with everything to play MP3's. As it stands I'd rather buy a [] MP3 player than buy the card for this and then have multiple cards to keep track of. I don't know why the other reviewers consider the built in camera to be good. When you see the pictures on the 320x320 screen they are already downsampled; when you see them at full resolution on a computer screen they look awful; downsampling them to 320x240 doesn't make them look much better. Even the cheapest and worst digital camers takes better pictures than the little camera in the Zire 71. I like the idea of a digital camera in a PDA but as poor as this one is I think they should skipped it and made it a little cheaper or upgraded something else on it.

In sum, this is a great little unit but do budget for a memory expansion and don't get your hopes up too much for its camera.

as well as the hotsyncing with xp.

The hotsynching although frustrating is dealable. I mainly only have trouble when I am trying to hotsync something that is online. Offline problems are less common, but then again most of my hotsyncing has been online so I am not sure how it would be offline.

My biggest problem is the battery life. I was told the battery is not replaceable. I think that sucks considering the price of something like this. Cell phones and gametoys are another thing their battery life may be short too but as far as phones go every year or two most companies give u an upgrade anyway (before battery totally dies)

Palms can be used everyday and the more on it (cameras, mp3, games etc) you use it even more and longer amount of time. Who wants to worry about the battery totally dying on you in a year. Palms are are like computers you get a new one and you have tons of info you have to reprogram and that is a major pain. Who wants to be forced to buy a whole new computer every year. I have had my palm for less than a year and battery life is getting bad. I have to do a overnight recharge everytime I look at it. (I am afraid to turn it on anymore so when I do happen to turn it on it battery is half gone) I dont use the camera much nor the mp3 player. I probably would use them alot if it wasnt for the battery. And like another reviewer said about this thing accidently turning on this thing is probably on a lot more than I think it is causing my lower battery life.