Writing On Your Palm

Palm Zire 71

5 May 2003

Palm's latest midrange model packs a mighty punch. But can it handle writing and ebooks as well as a Pocket PC?

Okay, I'll dispel the suspense right off the bat. The Zire 71 has displaced my ViewSonic Pocket PC as my primary, carry-everywhere device. I'm firmly in the PalmOS camp again.¹ I'm rediscovering the joys of Palm ownership, and now that Palm has finally caught up with Pocket PC in terms of hardware, there's really a lot to enjoy.

The Hardware

The screen will be the first thing you notice about the Zire 71. This is the brightest, sharpest transflective screen I've ever seen. It's brighter (and more readable outdoors -- the rumors of the Zire 71's screen being ill-suited for outdoor use are greatly exaggerated) than the screen on my trusty ViewSonic V35, and it's more vibrant than the screen on the iPAQ H1910. I still haven't seen the Toshiba e750, but I think it's safe to say that Palm now has the screen to beat. It is a square screen, no virtual Graffiti, but that has advantages too if you get into using Graffiti strokes for control and navigation -- I almost never actually use the menus on a Palm device, going straight to commands via Grafitti, and I missed that on the Pocket PC. I miss the 3:2 screen on my ViewSonic while reading ebooks -- I have to page down more often in iSilo than I did in µBook -- but on the whole I'm very impressed. This is quite a change from the lackluster screens of the m505 and m515.

I feel like James Bond with this camera. When not in use, it's completely hidden, with no external indication that it might exist. Nudge your thumb into the bottom edge of the blue faceplate, and the front and back panels slide laterally exposing the camera lens on the top of the front panel and a shutter button on the bottom of the back panel. The camera is a fixed-focus, zoomless VGA (0.3 megapixel) CCD, but I've been impressed with the quality of the shots. I've seen this camera bashed in reviews, but I think it's important to remember that this is not a serious digital camera. If you really want something that can do printable, photo-album shots, get a nice Kodak DX 6340 and forget about the Zire. The camera on this is the equivalent of a drug store disposable. You use it for taking quick, spontaneous shots of things you might not otherwise record. Quick shots of friends, the location where you parked, a nice sunset, that sort of thing. For that, the Zire's camera's works great. Coming at this from a writer's perspective, it's not lost on me that the low resolution of the camera is still pretty good for the web and this might be a good way to start adding more visuals to products I review. (hint, hint)

The device itself is another breakthrough for Palm, a sleek styled beauty that should appeal to a wide variety of consumers. It's even in Air Force colors, a definite plus for ex-blue-suiters like me. The curves of the case remind me of an Audi TT, a car I've longed for since it was released. I know Palm has been aesthetically-minded since the Palm V days, but I thought they rode that design a bit too long, turning something that started fresh and exciting into stodgy and boring. The Tungsten T, wow factor of the slide not withstanding, was even more blocky and uninspiring. The original Zire was better, borrowing liberally from the design of Apple's popular iPod, but didn't have the internals to back it up. The Zire 71 looks like it wants to fly.

And fly it does. I may seem terminally behind the times here, because the Zire 71 really varies very little from the Tungsten T internally. Both use 144MHz ARM CPUs from Texas Instruments (the only difference being that the Tungsten T's OMAP1510 CPU also includes an audio DSP that no one seems to use) and both units sport 16MB of RAM, Palm OS 5 and a Secure Digital expansion slot. I never really played with the Tungsten T, being more focused on the Microsoft side of the camp at the time. Let's face it; if you don't have a Bluetooth cell phone or Bluetooth in your PC, the Tungsten T isn't all that compelling over the cheaper Sony Clié NX-60.

But as I started using the Zire 71, my jaw dropped. This thing is fast. Intellectually, I know that PalmOS 5 is not much more than OS4 recompiled for the ARM (there are some other changes under the hood, but little substantial) and that the 144MHz ARM CPU in the Zire would be taxed less than the 33MHz Dragonball in my Clié N710C (may it rest in peace). I didn't realize how fast.

Nor did I realize how much time I'd grown accustomed to waiting for things on the Pocket PC. A second here, two seconds there may not seem like much, but the fact that DateBk5 and WordSmith come up instantaneously on my Zire 71 really call attention to the five to ten second delays I took as a matter of course bringing up Pocket Informant or TextMaker, respectively. The Zire 71 reacts so fast to my commands that I sometimes wonder if it doesn't have a little flux capacitor in there and is actually reacting to my thoughts before I think them.

And when I don't feel like thinking, or if I'm just not digging the Muzak playing in the restaurant where I'm writing, the Zire 71 does a bang-up job of handling music and audiobooks. I will agree with ZDNet/c|net and net pundits like Foo Fighter in that the audio volume could be louder. I use a pair of mid-quality earbuds with Jabra Eargels on them to funnel the sound into my ear canal. While my V35 would be nearly deafening at max volume with those headphones, max volume on the Zire 71 is merely adequate. It's loud enough to overcome road noise in my car (windows up) or traffic sounds when I'm out walking, but only just loud enough and that's at max. I might have to dig out my Boosteroo, a small portable amplifier powered by two AA batteries, for extended listening. Aside from the volume thing, the sound quality is quite good, and I can listen to Audible or Ogg files in pTunes (an awesome MP3/Ogg player for OS5 Palms) with no skips or pops. I'm not sure I'd classify the Zire 71 as an audio powerhouse, but it's perfectly sufficient for providing background music while you write.

The Software

PalmOS 5, as it initially debuted on the Tungsten T, really did look like PalmOS 4.1 recompiled for the new ARM processor. The Zire 71 comes preloaded with PalmOS 5.21, which actually looks and feels like an upgrade to the venerable operating system. Palm has done a much better job than Sony at updating the OS for high-resolution screens, and the Zire 71 is much more readable than any Clié. The Prefs panel has been reworked again to include the changeable color themes we saw in the pre-release OS5 screenshots, but not in the Tungsten T. VFS seems to work reliably now, unlike my last stint in the Palm world, and I'm starting to wonder if I really need apps like PowerRun.

The biggest change, though, is Graffiti's replacement with Graffiti 2, "powered by Jot." the Graffiti area looks the same, which may trip up experienced Palm users who try to dive right in and use the character recognition system they know. Graffiti 2 is not Graffiti. It's not really Jot, either. It's a mutant hybrid, and this is not, in my opinion, a beneficial mutation.

About half the Graffiti 2 strokes are the same or very similar to those in Graffiti. If you can get by using only that half of the English alphabet, you might do okay. The more unusual strokes from Graffiti, things like K and T, have been replaced with dual stroke glyphs that look more like real handwriting. The problem is that if you don't write them the same way Palm thinks you should, they won't be recognized. Frankly, this is a problem for me. I'm a southpaw, and there's no way to tell Graffiti 2 that I cross my Ts right to left. If I write "normally," I'll get a lower-case L and a backspace every time I try to write a T.

Punctuation is also a concern. One of the things I loved about Graffiti was that just about any Latin-1 character you needed to write was only two strokes away at most, provided you knew the strokes to enter. A tap to enter punctuation mode followed by an "h" gives you a hash (#). Works every time. In Graffiti 2, you have to do an upstroke (which use to capitalize, but now enters "extended" mode, another confusing departure for experienced Graffiti users), then two horizontal lines, two vertical lines, and a closing upstroke to get the same hash. Triple the strokes to get just one character!

It took roughly ten minutes for Graffiti 2 to drive me completely insane. Firstly it convinced me that strapped for cash or not, I had to buy a Palm Portable Keyboard as soon as humanly possible. I'm typing this review on it now, and I'd forgotten since giving up my Jornada nearly a year ago how comfortable the classic Stowaway design is. Secondly Graffiti 2 convinced me that it had to go. But with OS5 no longer supporting Hacks, what could I do?

Fortunately, the folks at TealPoint are clever little buggers. TealScript has been updated to support OS5, and the default profile in TealScript is very close to the original Graffiti (with the added benefit of throwing in several Jot-like strokes, allowing me to mix and match if I so choose). After slapping a couple of inches of matte finish tape over the Graffiti area, I can now write happily on my Zire 71 with the stylus -- well, a stylus, usually not the light plastic toothpick that comes with it -- at speeds never achievable on the Pocket PC.²

Okay, enough of that. This column is about writing. So how does the Zire 71 measure up?

Well, out of the box, not well. It's not bundled with DataViz's Documents To Go like the devices in the business-oriented Tungsten line, and yes, the 4k limit in Memo Pad is still there. Fortunately, a great strength of PalmOS devices has always been the availability of third party software, and there are several reasons not to go running back to Pocket Word, or even TextMaker. I'll give them a quick once-over now, and I'll try to schedule more comprehensive reviews of each later.

WordSmith, now at version 2.2.10, is still my favorite. Not only does it not destroy sophisticated formatting from the desktop version of the document the way Pocket Word does, it allows you full control over it on the handheld. You can set margins, justification (though full justification isn't actually displayed on the handheld), comments, footnotes, etc. It's got a decent spell checker and thesaurus built in -- and on the Zire 71, they're as fast as those on the Pocket PC -- and unlike most Palm word processors, it also handles word counts. This last item is the biggest reason I'm still sticking with WordSmith over the competition: I have to have word counts.

The latest and greatest Documents to Go was a little underwhelming. It handled all the doc files I threw at it well enough, but the lack of a spell checker was enough to send me packing.

I did try out the new version of QuickOffice Premiere, which now supports reading and writing native Word .doc files off the card, but I found it to be little better than Pocket Word in other respects. Like WordSmith, it also handles spell checking, but no word count and no way to specify paragraph formatting. If I wanted to keep putting two returns between paragraphs, I could stick with something simple like pedit.

I've also rediscovered the joys of DateBk5, ShadowPlan and found out that McPhling just about makes up for PalmOS being a task switching operating system rather than a true multitasking OS.

I've tried several ebook readers for PalmOS, noting what does and doesn't work on the Zire 71's high resolution screen. Palm Reader is still a great reading experience, but it's a hassle to convert the files, even with Palm eBook Studio. I'm spoiled by µBook, and don't want to spend even five minutes converting each title I install. iSilo is well-adapted to OS5, and does a great job of spidering web sites and installing them to the card. Unfortunately, the low-res fonts that it can use on the Clié are unavailable on the Zire 71, so the type's kind of big and bulky. MobiPocket works well, most legit ebook sources support it, and the included Blue Highway font shows a lot of text on screen, but how many book readers do I need? Plucker has a nice high resolution version that would be great if it worked reliably. I wonder how much I'd have to beg/bribe to get µBook ported to PalmOS? iSilo supports reading ASCII text files off the card, so it can be done…

The Zire 71 comes with VersaMail 2.5, a match for the PPC's Inbox application. It syncs with Outlook, including selectable subfolders, and it supports checking mail directly over POP3/IMAP if you have a way to connect. Setup was a little hairy -- it flat out refused to sync folders at first -- but really no worse than changing the defaults in ActiveSync. In some ways, it's even better than Inbox. It's much easier, for example, to specify what you want deleted off the server and what you want to keep.

And in case you were wondering when I'd launch into song about the wonders of HotSync Manager opposed to ActiveSync, I won't. I spend the better part of an evening this week listening to my Palm go, "Tweedle-dee-tweedle-doo" while it absolutely refused to sync. HotSync Manager's log said that "an application failed to respond to a HotSync request," but didn't specify who the troublemaker was. After about four hours of trial and error, I finally got the problem to go away by reinstalling VersaMail from the CD. This is more time than I've spent figuring out any individual ActiveSync blunder. Anyone who tells you that either Palm's or Microsoft's sync software is better than the other isn't pushing the software hard enough. I'll grant you that I installed conduits for pretty much everything under the sun in the past week, but I'm less than impressed with HotSync's reliability.

The Bottom Line

Palm SG has a winner with this one. The addition of a camera makes the Zire 71 much more useful for communications -- a picture is worth a thousand words, after all -- and apps like Mobipocket, Versamail and Wordsmith hold their own against their Pocket PC counterparts. This one should sell like hotcakes, and with a couple choice additions (writing software, TealScript, an external keyboard) the Zire 71 makes a great writing machine.