Palm Zire 71
A mere 12 months after its launch, the Zire 71 has been consigned to history, superseded by the Zire 72, with rather better specifications.
Roger Gann | Monday, August 30 2004Palm PDAs are appearing at an ever more furious rate. A mere 12 months after its launch, the Zire 71 has been consigned to history, superseded by the Zire 72, with rather better specifications.
The new PDA’s clever styling makes it look slimmer than it really is — it’s actually a shade bigger than its predecessor. The 71’s eye-catching blue-and-silver colour scheme has been retained but this time the fascia is sheathed in a bright blue matt rubber coating, which makes it easier to hold.
There are substantial changes on the inside, too. The Zire 72 has a new 312MHz XScale PXA270 processor, a big improvement over the 71’s TI Omap 310 chip. This leap in performance makes the 72 a decidedly snappy mover. The PXA270 includes Wireless MMX — the set of multimedia-oriented instructions taken from the desktop Pentium family — which bodes well for digital data processing on the Zire. This may be one of the reasons why the 72 runs Palm OS 5.2.8 and not 5.2.1.
You also get 32MB, twice the RAM that the Zire 71 offered, although only 24MB is available to the user. This might seem light by Pocket PC standards, but it’s quite generous for a Palm. The top-mounted SDIO slot provides scope for further expansion. And you’ll need to invest in a Secure Digital card if you plan to play MP3s or record video. With no bundled memory card, video recording will not work straight out of the box. Unfortunately, the expansion slot is recessed, so extracting an SD card can be fiddly.
Other bonuses are the inclusion of a voice memo recorder and the ease with which Bluetooth can be used.
On some devices Bluetooth can be a nightmare to set up. Palm OS makes it simple to connect the Zire 72 to a mobile, a Windows XP PC running ICS (internet connection sharing), or a local network. As a result, pairing a compatible phone with the 72 for multimedia messaging and mobile internet access is only a click or two away. On the down side, the list of directly supported phones is quite a short one.
Multimedia is the watchword of the Zire 72. Its case no longer slides open to reveal the integral digicam — the camera is now permanently on show at the back, which felt a bit exposed for our taste. It offers four times the resolution that the 71 does — up from 640x480 to 1,280x960. The new PXA processor can apparently handle up to 4Mp (megapixels), so there is some room for expansion.
Picture quality is reasonable for a 1.2Mp device. It won’t rival dedicated digital cameras but it easily beats most current camera phones. The 320x320 transflective screen, which you use as a viewfinder, is very good. Up there with the Tungstens, in fact.
New to the Zire range is the RealOne Player for Palm. This is a reasonably good MP3 player but don’t expect it to turn the Zire 72 into an iPod. The lack of a Real high-compression/high-quality codec means MP3s soon eat up all the space on the SD card.
Palm PDAs used to have a battery life measured in weeks, but the backlit colour display has well and truly put paid to that. Despite having an XScale CPU, you’ll be lucky to get a week of use from the Zire’s 950mAh lithium-ion battery. And if you use Bluetooth and play MP3s a lot, battery life drops to no more than five hours.
The PalmOne Zire 72 is a huge improvement on its short-lived predecessor, with a faster processor and more RAM. Bluetooth is now almost user-friendly and the improved digicam delivers usable snaps. This PDA’s not a bad MP3 player, either. PalmOS and its bundled applications are also much improved but, despite a power-efficient CPU, intense multimedia use will soon drain the battery.
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