PalmOne Zire 71 Handheld

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Product Details

Product Manual [4.18mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00008WFVI
• Item model number: P80720US
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (182 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #13,044 in Electronics (See Bestsellers in Electronics)

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  Electronics > Computers & Accessories > PDAs & Handhelds

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 23, 2003

Product Description

Amazon.com Review
Palm’s Zire brand is designed primarily for consumers rather than for professionals. The first Zire was a low cost, entry level machine, this one, the second in the range, is a multimedia extravaganza. The most eye catching feature of the Zire 71, after you’ve noticed the sleek rounded blue casing for the hardware, is the built-in digital camera.

The Zire 71's built-in digital camera

You need to slide the upper and lower body apart to reveal it, and when you do so the Zire 71’s screen automatically turns into a viewfinder. Click the button that is also revealed during the sliding process, and you can take pictures, at resolutions of 160 x 120, 320 x 240 and 640 x 480.

Palm has even produced a new version of Palm Desktop to help you make the most of managing digital images. This includes a nice viewer and some editing tools. Palm Desktop also, incidentally, has a new installer which is more efficient than before when it comes to selecting multiple applications to send to your Palm. The Zire 71 runs version 5 of the Palm operating system, which has improved sound features. Install the provided copy of the Real One player and you can play MP3 music through headphones. Gaming is assisted by a joystick style navigation button that sits beneath the screen. But when you want to use the Zire 71 for more traditional personal information management tasks you can tap the application shortcut buttons to launch Date Book, Address Book or Note Pad. The fourth button takes you to your digital photo library. As usual these buttons can be reallocated to other applications if you like.

Only 13MB of to the 16MB of memory on board is actually available for applications and data, but an SD card slot means you can add to this easily. The screen is a superb transreflective TFT type – it is the best we’ve seen on a PDA from Palm. The Universal Connector means existing peripherals like keyboards which support this should work without problems with the Zire 71. The Zire 71 is a great multimedia PDA which finally puts Palm in a position to rival Sony for its Multimedia crown. --Sandra Vogel

Product Description
Keep phone numbers and addresses on hand. Write to-do lists. Take notes in meetings. The Zire 71 handheld helps you do it all - and keep it all organized. The joystick-like 5-way navigator gives you quick, one-handed access to your information. Want to capture a spontaneous moment? Simply slide your handheld open to expose the protected, hidden camera. Then point, shoot and share with friends and family. Take your favorite MP3s, video clips and audio books with you wherever you go. It is a snap to organize and move files from your handheld to your desktop and back again. A new, high-resolution color screen vibrantly displays images, graphics and type. Rechargeable batteries give you plenty of time to enjoy the action. An ultra-fast ARM processor handles the most demanding media tasks with blazing efficiency. Plus, 16 MB of memory gives you plenty of storage space for digital photos, games and applications.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

111 of 116 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 1st Upgrade, May 8, 2003

By	M. G. Samuelsen (Syracuse, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite simply an object of deZire.., April 27, 2003

By	Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

159 of 183 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sorely disappointed in multimedia functions, July 30, 2003

By	Gadgester "No Time, No Money" (Mother Earth) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

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.