Palm Zire 71 Handheld Reviews

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.

Rating: 5 - Very Satisfied
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.

Rating: 4 - Very nice
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.

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Palm Zire 71 Handheld