Customer Reviews

PalmOne Zire 71 Handheld

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(51)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pros:
1. Incredible screen; best I've ever seen, even vs. Tungsten C.
2. Camera is surprisingly good, considering it's a secondary (and maybe even tertiary) function of the unit.
3. Syncs up flawlessly with old Palm OS data.
4. Very good sound for such a small unit, especially through headphones.
5. Bundled software was better than I anticipated.
6. Did I mention the screen? Wow.
7. Nice value, and good software support from third party vendors.

Cons:
1. Included carrying case is worthless, and it seems improbable to add a case or cover that keeps the unit slim like the slick Palm V design. Have to resort to bulky leather cases with velcro. Designers haven't figured out that users want simplicity, or they conveniently forgot after Palm V.
2. Stylus is made of weightless cheap plastic. C'mon, Palm. At least include a decent one for an extra buck or two, like (again) you did with the Palm V.
3. Two-tone silver and blue looks nice, but too much like Sony, and the silver smudges easily. Seems sturdy though. I'd prefer metal (like, guess what: the Palm V!) but for the price, it seems OK.
4. Unit seems wobbly in the cradle, which offers no charge light (no light at all).
5. Unit is fairly fragile. Don't drop it! I dropped mine from about 15 inches onto a chair mat, and something came loose inside. Still works, but now also functions as a baby rattle.
6. Ridiculous packaging -- a nitpicky gripe -- but it's secured in industrial-grade bubble plastic as if Palm anticipates NASA field testing. It took five Linebackers and a Navy SEAL with jackhammers and blowtorches to get the friggin' package open. What happened to the respectable box?

Overall: An excellent consumer/entertainment unit for the money. For business types, I recommend the a Tungsten.

My wife lives and dies by her old Palm M100, and I bought her the Palm Zire 71 as a birthday present. She is thrilled with it, and that was before she discovered the built in digital camera. We encountered absolutely no problems with installing the Palm Desktop software. It also automatically loaded all the information (datebook, address book, etc) on the old Palm Desktop program from her last Hotsync with the M100 over to the Zire 71, as well as the shareware applications she had such as solitaire, tetris and her checkbook program. I knew from reading other reviews that some of the other people who bought new palms had a problem with compatibility for their older software, but we had only two very minor problems. (First, the solitaire program (freeware and God knows how old it was) did not work, but it certainly didn't cause any system crash. Second, the older programs were black and white, not color, but that was hardly a surprise.) We deleted the solitaire and we'll probably find some color shareware programs to replace the others. There were no problems with the hardware or the case. It has a very solid feel, and the metallic case is eyecatching. We took a few pictures of ourselves at dinner and had people from other tables coming over to look at it. Some of the negative reviews have complained that the camera isn't HQ. It is what it is. The picture quality is good for e-mail and excellent for viewing on the palm itself, and it seems to handle different light levels very well considering it doesn't have a flash. It doesn't handle very low light or motion well. If you plan on printing out photos to frame and hang on your wall, I'd use something else.

PROS
- Very high geek factor for the money. Not many people have seen this Palm yet, so they drool over it.
-Picture quality excellent for e-mail. I have other means to take digital pictures, and I know one of the pains of having high quality digital photos is that I have to convert my pics to lower resolution for most of my relatives (They are all 56k-ers; they'd be downloading for hours if I sent full resolution) Most pics we've taken with the Palm seem to end up in the 40-50K range, perfect for e-mail.
-The device itself is great. No defects in workmanship. No flimsy parts. (The M-100 had a flip cover that broke off after a couple weeks) Sharp screen with nice color saturation. Easy to look at. Came with a nice carrying case.
-Rechargeable

CONS-

-Wish it came bundled with documents-to-go like some other palm products.
-Made in China. Who knows what sneaky communist stuff is hiding in the code?

PS: I would add one other thing from a customer service point of view. I've shopped with Amazon for years. I've never had an issue with Amazon.com before. I click, I pay, my item comes in the mail. End of story. This Palm, coming USPS, didn't show up, and when I tracked the package, it listed it as delivered and the order completed. I e-mailed Amazon to let them know that I had not yet received the item, and within 18 hours they responded by apologizing and sending another one 2-day priority mail, free of charge. Of course I expected to get what I paid for eventually, but I was impressed that there was absolutely zero hassle about resolving my problem.

There are so many diffrent types of palms out today that you don't know what to get. I consider myself somewhat tech-savvy so i was torn between the Zire 71, Tungsten T, and Sony Clie. In doing my research, the Tungsten's most attractive feature was the keyboard, but let's face it: are you going to be typing long documents via the mini keyboard? For hard core typing, i prefer using my actual desktop computer where i don't have to strain and punch tiny keys with my thumb. And Bluetooth? None of my wireless tools are Bluetooth enabled, and very few on the market are right now unless you seek it out. Finally i chose the zire 71 b/c of the camera. Everyone says that the digital camera on the zire 71 is useless due to its low rez. True in one sense; after all, i have a REAL digital cam for great photography. But you know what? This mini cam actually is a fantastic addition b/c it allows you to take VISUAL MEMOS. This can practically eliminate graffiti (or mini keyboard) when you want to type in the latest cd on your wish list. WHy scribble when you can take a snapshot of it? you don't need major megapixels for that, and it proves to be a very useful tool. I work in a visual/creative environment, so it's indispensible. All around town (and i live in NYC)i take visual memos with my zire (I'll be in the record store and take pix of cds i want, i'll take pix of furniture at Ikea to later look at in the comfort of my home to rearrange furniture, I'll take pix of the latest restaurant review instead of dragging the entire magazine around or tearing out the article, i'll take pix of business cards or store hours or anything that i need to quickly refer to. It makes me increasingly paperless. And when i do need to type actual text (even tho i hate graffiti), I just download Tealscript (it's free) to create my own custom graffiti so I don't have to adhere to Palm's rigid strokes.

I got the Palm Zire 71 after my almost 3 year old Handspring Visor stopped hotsyncing. I had bought the 3 year extended warranty from Best Buy. After putting it off for a few months i went in with 14 days till my warranty expired. They just let me pick out any unit... Needless to say the Zire has a lot more features. The display is the best on the market. It looks much sharper than the clie models at Best Buy. I also got a 128mb card at compusa... so the 16mb was not a big deal. I have found the camera to be a fun little extra. Sure you are not going to use it as your primary camera but it is a nice extra that i feel take pretty good pictures. The graffiti 2 does take a little while getting used to. I also agree with the other reviewers on the stainless steel case. It is very hard to hold onto. I am going to order the leather flap case on the palm website asap.

Positive: Great display
Fast processor
Fun camera
MP3 player
Joy stick controller
Long battery life
Great value - compare features/specs to other models

Negatives: Case is very hard to hold onto but looks good
Original graffiti users have to learn graffiti 2
Have to buy external memory do download MP3s, (i do
know if this is b/c of the Zire of realplayer)

Overall this is a great unit. Previous PDA owners will love this as an upgrade and new PDA buyers I feel will find it exceeds all their expectations.

Well first off let me say that this is an amazing device. We have become spoiled and demanding with our technology, but lets just take a moment to look at what this tiny thing can do. The way some people are reviewing this product, you would think they expect it to make them breakfast and drive them to work! Sheesh! Yes, its [$$] USD, but come on!

Personally this little guy has revolutionized my lifestyle. The uses I have found for it are infinite. With 13 MB actual of actual storage capacity it has plenty of room to store a ton of programs and with 144MHz processor, it is downright speedy when loading apps as well performing all the normal Palm tasks.

The practical: First and foremost I have organized every event and appointment as well as set alarms to go off before the scheduled events in the task organizer. (I am notoriously forgetful). It takes me about 10-15 minutes to schedule 2 weeks worth of info. I sync it with my wifes Palm to keep abreast of the budget and checkbook balance. I use it to jot down quick notes or reminders. I use it at church to both view my bible AND take notes on the sermon. I use it to play games like Tetris when I have long waits, etc, etc.

The fun: With the Palm Zire 71 I listen to MP3s when I ride to work. I take pictures of friends, family members, items Id like to buy and their prices at different stores, recipes out of books I dont want to buy! I even watch video clips and show them off to friends. Believe me this thing is an eye catcher.

The pictures are pretty darn good quality, at 640x480 they look great, Ive even blown them up to use as desktops on my 27 flat screen monitor. (check out the pictures I posted of a concert at thecomatorium.com > photos > summer tour 2003 > Denver: gothic theatre). Playback of MP3s sound killer with decent headphones. The display on the whole unit is nothing short of beautiful.

I dont care what anybody says, the Palm Zire 71 is amazing and will make you 75% cooler.

Cons: Could have come with better carrying case and maybe an extra SD card. More choices for media players (I hate Real player products!) MP3s are a pain if you have issues with a little patience. Video transfers are so-so quality, especially the audio. Would like if it were available in other colors besides blue.

Overview: All in all this is a great product all the way around. If you want a flawless camera, you can buy just a digital camera for the same price. If you want more memory, buy a PC! Try hauling those around your pocket.