Zires Get an Update
3 May 2004
After months of speculation and better than usual information security (PalmOne is better at controlling leaks that the White House), PalmOne released new Zires last week. Both units have pros and cons, but they should do well and continue PalmOne's success with the Zire line. In case you hadn't been paying attention, the Zire line of palmtops has been a runaway success for PalmOne, with only the iPod selling better among consumer electronics. New users are picking up Zires left and right, mostly young first time users and women. The new Zires will appeal even more to this demographic. Let's take a look at the new units.
Zire 31
The Zire 31 sets a new bar for "low-end" devices. Packing more features than the "high-end" devices of just a few years ago (remember the m515?), this is more than just a "soccer-mom" PDA.
For one thing, the Zire 31 fully supports multimedia audio. It ships with both Real Player and Audible, and works just fine with Pocket Tunes (use the low resolution skins designed for the Treo 600). Sound quality is pretty good, and the Zire 31 should compete strongly against dedicated flash-based MP3 players in the same price range. The SD slot is SDIO compliant, so it should also work with the FM radio SD card. The Zire 31 is also one of the cheapest Audible players on the market, so this will be a great gift item for audiobook lovers.
Like the Tungstens T3 and E, the Zire 31 comes with PalmOne's enhanced PIM applications. Date Book, Address Book, To Do List and Memo Pad have been replaced by Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Memos, respectively. Notes and memos can now be up to 32k, events can span midnight, tasks can have alarms and repeats, and everything syncs with Outlook just about perfectly. While the Zire like is supposed to appeal to style-conscious consumers, the advanced PIM performance and low price might make the Zire 31 attractive to budget-wary businesses.
How low is the price? PalmOne has managed to cram a good PDA with a great software suite and excellent audio capabilities into a mere $150. Never has a PDA done this much for so little, and PalmOne has managed to exploit a price point Windows Mobile devices can't reach. The price alone should make the Zire 31 one of PalmOne's best sellers.
"Should?" What would stop something with these features and this price from being a runaway hit? In two words: Bad screen. While the screen on the Zire 31 is color, it's just about the worst color screen you could get on a PDA. It's transmissive, so it fades to a black sheet of glass in sunlight. It's passive matrix, so it has enough ghosting and a slow enough response to be useless for gaming. And while I'm not going to knock it for being 160x160, PalmOne bills it as having "thousands of colors," almost certainly marketing-speak for a 12-bit, 4,096 color screen. Low color depth banding and dithering is clearly visible in the launcher and Agenda backgrounds, a sign that you will not want to use the Zire 31 as a photo album.
On the whole, I like this device. The only Achilles Heel is the screen, but that one feature is so bad it may turn people off to an otherwise pint-sized powerhouse.
Zire 72
When PalmOne first started the Zire and Tungsten lines, they cautioned against thinking that the Zires were low end and Tungstens were high end. They said that we might someday see a Zire with more features than some of the Tungstens. That day has come, with the Zire 72 outclassing the Tungsten E and giving the Tungsten T3 a run for its money. At twice the price of the Zire 31, the Zire 72 shows few of the compromises found in its little brother.
The first thing I noticed about the Zire 72 was the no slip, rubberized texture to the deep blue area around its perimeter. One of the biggest problems I had with my Zire 71 was that it was just too darn slippery. It had a glossy chrome finish on the back half that looked cool, but had a tendency to jump out of my hands if they got a little sweaty. The Zire 72 feels about as secure as something that isn't actually adhesive can be, and I have no problems carrying this around in my hand.
The second thing I noticed was that it's tiny, much smaller than the Zire 71, and only a bit larger than the Palm V-sized Tungsten E. Even last year, if someone had told me PalmOne could cram all the features of the Zire 72 into something the size of a Palm V, I'd have laughed my head off. Well, they did it. This device sees the iPAQ 1945 and the Toshiba e405 and raises.
The Zire 72 is not only the first of the Zire line to include Bluetooth, but it does it better than the Tungstens. Setting up a Bluetooth pairing with a phone has never been easier, and setting up for Bluetooth HotSyncing is just as easy. I didn't see any support for Bluetooth keyboards like Logitech's superb DiNovo, but here's hoping that gets added soon.
The Zire 72 is also the first Zire to include a voice recorder. This feature works identically to the voice recorders on the Tungstens and it's a welcome addition. I sold a Zire 72 yesterday to a couple as a college graduation gift for their daughter, and the voice recorder was one of their decision points (the daughter is going into psychology, where dictating patient notes is pretty common). Granted, the great screen, MP3 and camera didn't hurt.
Speaking of the camera, the Zire 72 improves on the resolution of the Zire 71, but the jury's still out on whether this is an upgrade in total quality. The Zire 72 camera is 1.2 megapixel, with a maximum resolution of 1,280 x 960. This odd resolution is to fit better on 4x6 inch photo paper, the standard size for snapshots and the only paper size other than wallet that the Zire 72 can print a photo-quality image. The problem with the Zire 72 camera seems to be in the lensing rather than the CCD. The color quality seems a bit off in most of the pictures I've seen. The pictures I've taken in the store aren't as bad as the picture of Ed Hardy's purple cat in his Brighthand review, but they do fall short of the image quality I get out of a good Sony or Kodak digital. The Zire 72 camera is wonderful for what it's meant for, candid spur-of-the-moment snapshots, but you'll probably want to take a dedicated digital camera with you on vacation.
One of the things I absolutely love about the Zire 72 is how deeply the imaging is integrated into other applications. Pictures taken with the camera can be used as backgrounds for your launcher and the Agenda view on the Calendar application. In the Contacts application, you now have a dedicated Picture field into which you can attach either a pre-taken picture or go right to the camera and snap a shot of the person you're talking to. Either way the image is reduced to a thumbnail and stored directly in the contact record, an improvement to the way the Sony Cliés that had this feature linked to the image in the photos app. If you later remove the source picture from your Zire 72, the image in Contacts is still there. It's almost worth buying a Zire 72 for this feature alone, as anyone in sales who needs to recognize people by face can attest.
A nifty feature on both new Zires is a spring-loaded door on the SD slot. No more dummy SD cards! A small addition, surely, but worth mentioning.
The Zire 72 is the first Zire (I'm getting sick of typing that) to include Documents To Go as a standard part of the bundle. This blurs the line a bit between the Zires and Tungstens, since this was always a "business-oriented" Tungsten feature. I guess PalmOne decided a high-end device like the Zire 72 might appeal to people that want to work on business stuff in their off time.
What are the cons of the Zire 72? I've only uncovered one so far, not counting the picture quality of the camera. On our demo unit at the store, the directional pad is erratic, frequently registering a system "click" sound when the select button is pressed, but not actually selecting anything. I don't know if this is a software or hardware issue, but it's annoying, especially since the camera uses the d-pad select button as the shutter button. I've seen other people complain of this on various message boards, so I know it's an issue with either this first batch of hardware or the underlying software in the Zire 72. Let's hope it's the latter, and PalmOne issues a fix quickly.
But What About the Tungstens?
This spring rollout was just about the Zires, with no mention of the rumored Tungsten E2. While PalmOne is predictably silent, I think there's a pretty safe bet that we'll see a fall rollout of Tungstens, all running the new PalmOS Cobalt:
The Tungsten E2: This is rumored to be the same size and shape as the E, but with a T3-like 320x480 screen and Bluetooth. This rumor is the biggest thing keeping me from buying a Zire 72 right now.
The Tungsten C2: Rumors floating around peg this as an update to the C with a backlit keyboard and about half the thickness of the lovable but bulky C. My writing partner, a dedicated C-user, is hoping for a long 320x480 screen, making the device resemble the longish iPAQ 4355, but I doubt this personally.
The Tungsten T4: This last one is completely hypothetical at this point, with no solid evidence of its existence. I would like to see something similar in size to the E (PalmOne has forever ditched the slider concept) with a 320x480 screen, built in Bluetooth and 802.11g WiFi, a first in two respects. One, no handheld has the high-speed G WiFi variant (although a G-on-a-chip design has just been announced) and two, PalmOne has deliberately avoided a dual-wireless device in the past, ceding this market to HP's iPAQs and Sony's UX-50 and the European version of the TH-55. A Cobalt-based PalmOne device with dual-wireless would be a world beater.
And one last comment. I've seen a lot of folks in the discussion groups lament the fact that neither of the new Zires sports Palm's so called Universal Connector. In fact, I think it's telling that no device with the PalmOne name has the UC, and with the introduction of the new Zires the devices without the UC now outnumber those with it still in production.
Instead of the complicated and fragile Universal Connector, the new PalmOne devices, like the Zire, Zire 21 and Tungsten E before them, use a combination of an industry-standard five-pin Mini-USB connector and a round DC jack that happens to be the exact same 5-volt, 1-amp jack used by most Kyocera and Samsung cell phones. This makes finding replacement sync cables, car chargers, wall chargers and other accessories drop-dead simple, and I applaud PalmOne for adopting a standard USB plug, giving rise to a truly "universal" connector. Those complaining of the lost UC are usually using keyboards, GPS, cradles and other devices designed for that connector, but I'd argue that IR keyboards and Bluetooth for everything else makes the UC and other proprietary connectors like it obsolete dinosaurs as we move into a new age of interoperability in mobile computing.
So welcome the new Zires. Long may they reign. (At least until September or so.)
Jeff Kirvin
Jeff@writingonyourpalm.net
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