Palm Zire 71

Feature-packed, fast and colour to boot.

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Price: £249

Manufacturer: Palm

Specifications:

Ratings

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Verdict

Pros:

So many features; fast.

Cons:
Graffiti 2 is very confusing.

Overall:
It may not be very attractive, but the Zire 71 is one of the most feature-packed, best value-for-money PDAs on the market.

Mark Walsh, Personal Computer World 11 Jul 2003

The first Palm Zire, released last summer, was a bit of a disappointment. It may have been cheap at just £100, but it had a black and white screen and was slow and rather unsightly.

The Zire 71 may look very similar, but technically it's a completely different proposition. At £250 it's not much less than what you'd expect to pay for a Tungsten T, but you get a lot for your money.

First, it uses Palm OS 5 and has a 144MHz Arm processor. It's capable of mp3 and mpeg playback, with headphone socket at the top, and it has a surprisingly good speaker.

The 320 x 320 resolution screen is fabulous - very similar, if not identical, to the Tungsten T, and while perfectly suited to video, text is still beyond reproach.

The Zire 71 also comes with a VGA digital camera that you slide out like you would a Nokia phone. The capture button is at the bottom and the lens at the top. You can use 13MB of the flash memory to store images, but you can expand this by using the SD card slot.

Picture quality is better than you'd expect, and the quality of the screen helps show these images off in the slide show function.

The four shortcut buttons are rather small, but the joystick-style five way navigation button is very simple to use.

One thing we were disappointed with was the introduction of Graffiti 2. While some may find the Pocket PC-isms of this version of Graffiti an improvement, we found them very irritating - to type a 'T' for instance now takes a vertical then a horizontal stroke, while an apostrophe appears when entering the '7', like the shape of yore.

The Zire's only real rival is Sony's Clie NX-70, which is twice the size, £100 more, slightly better featured but harder to use. If multimedia is important, the Zire 71 is very likely the one for you.

Contact: Palm
www.palm.com/uk

Specifications: