Product Review

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Palm Zire 71

Palm Zire 71

Ok.. I know that I’ve been down this road before, looking for a replacement for my old Palm Pilot. Approximately 18 months ago I purchased and reviewed the Sony Clie with the built in camera. It topped out at around $600, and for the price it was not worth keeping. There were so many shortcomings with that model. I hope that Sony worked some of them out. The best feature was the screen, a beautiful high resolution, TFT color screen. At the time Sony was the only vendor with a Palm OS based unit with such a nice screen. That has all changed.

I first saw Palm’s new line of high resolution products a few months ago. I immediately loved the Zire 71, a Palm Pilot with a gorgeous high resolution display and a built in camera, all for around $300. This had all the features I loved about the Sony at half the price. I had set a budget for my next palm and it was around $200, so I was still going to wait.

Well the wait paid off in spades. When I saw the price drop to $250 at Staples I decided to take another look. Timing was perfect as not only was the price now $250 but they were offering a $25 rebate and Palm was throwing in a $99 MP3 upgrade kit as well. Now I really was getting everything that I wanted at a price I was pleased with.

I’ve been using my Zire 71 for about a week now. It works really well. It has all the features and compatibility of my old Palm but is much, much faster. The camera is ok, but don’t expect too much from it. I’m pretty disappointed with the quality of the photos, but I guess you should not expect photo quality from something like this. The largest photo's are 640x480. It has been useful for a reference tool and has bailed me out of a jam when I forgot my digital camera. The Palm Desktop software works well, as always, and now includes the Palm Photo section that automatically downloads your photos to your computer without the need of a memory card. This was a major drawback with the Sony as you could not get any pictures from the Clie without a memory stick.

The other nice feature of the Zire is it’s built in MP3 player. Palm provides a desktop and portable version of Real.com’s RealOne player. When you have the Zire in the cradle, you can download songs from your desktop to an MMC or SC memory card using the RealOne player from your desktop. The memory card is required for MP3 Playback. I really like the MP3 player feature and they've made it easy with the RealOne integration.

The memory card slot is very useful to store data as well as applications. The Zire 71 only has 16 megs built in with 3 megs or so used up by system information so the memory card is necessary for running larger applications or games. Lastly the built in battery charges when the unit is in the cradle. So far I've been impressed with the battery life.

All in all, if you are looking to upgrade to a new Palm device, take a close look at the Palm Zire 71. If you need more built-in memory and Word, Excel, and Power Point compatibility out of the box, take a look at the Tungsten line of Palms. The Tungsten E has twice the built-in memory and basic MS Office compatibility for only $199.

Please visit this link for a complete list of features and products:  http://www.palmOne.com/us/products/handhelds