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New Palms: Zire 71 and Tungsten C
securitas writes "Today Palm released their latest in the PDA arms race: the Zire 71 and the Tungsten C. The Zire gets a color screen, digital camera and multimedia capabilities such as MP3 playback and 640x480 VGA video playback -- interesting since the screen is 320x320. The Tungsten C gets 802.11b (WiFi) connectivity and a VPN client to protect your data while in transit. More at
InternetNews, PC World and Business Week/CNet."
It's a shame such a prodoct doesn't have bluetooth : I think It would have been much cheaper and battery saving than to use WiFi ?
Any Ideas why it hasn't been included ?
Besides, it's important noting those PDA have an integrated keyboard.
No extra hardware increases the value to the user without the cost of production. What's the hold up?
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It's quite interesting that Palm selected the low-end Zire name for the 71. It 3 times the price of the original Zire, 8 times the memory, a much faster processor and a *much* better display.
If I recall, the Zire was an attempt to get the "its just a little too expensive" consumer crowd to buy into the Palm family.
BTW, my non-techie wife loves her Zire. It's just good enough to do the things she wants (calendar, address book) but nothing more.
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Granted, I could add an SD or MMC card but really ... 16MB is pretty weak. I would like to see Palm at least have 256MB on board, especially if I am going to use this for any type of music or video!
$300 better spent on a 5GB iPod. I can use my phone for PDA functions.
PS. I have and use a Palm m125.
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God fsckn' damnit!!! I just did a 5-second snipe on a Tungsten T last night on eBay and I see this in the morning!
Overall, I think I still would have bought the TT over the TC. I bought my Palm mostly for portable editing of Word & Excel files (Palms do this better than PocketPC apparently).
In connection with the foregoing, I intend to buy the full-sized Ultra Thin keyboard. I've seen a lot of nice Clie's with built-in keyboards already, and I think for any real work a bigger keyboard will be better, supplemented by grafitti for quick note jotting.
The Wi-Fi built-into the TC would not be of much use to me. In fact, I have no use for the Bluetooth built-into the TT. If I ever need to use Wi-Fi, there's always SDIO add-in cards.
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With WiFi and Bluetooth becoming standard (or at least peripheral), I am waiting on the applications to make my PDA even more usefull than it already is. Like an SSH client and true IMAP, POP3 email client.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear to be bright. Until you hear them speak.
Most people I know that have PDAs download dictionaries, thesauri, maps into their RAM. Would it be possible and realistic for manufacturers to sell PDAs with ROMs that have data like the aforementioned dictionaries, thesauri, & maps? Perhaps this static memory would include music files, and books from Project Gutenberg that are in the public domain.
I guess this would make the PDAs akin to the Hitchikers Guide to the Universe.
Does anyone know if this is feasible?
Believe it or not, different people have different needs/wants.
For me, a Palm m100 is mostly worthless. For that matter, any current Palm OS model is. I use my PDAs like a 'real computer,' it is just as useful (or perhaps even more so) than a cheap laptop.
But then again, as you say, until Palm makes a PDA that replaces a cheap laptop, you'd have no reason to upgrade. And I would have no reason to buy a Palm OS device. Perhaps by Palm OS 6, the POS will both be good enough for me and compelling enough for you. For someone who uses a PDA as an overpriced organizer and gimpy gamestation, darn near any model of POS device works great. My girlfriend has a very old Palm Pro, and besides the hardware sucking, I does pretty much everything the vast majority of what POS users do with their Palms. No wifi, no color, but eh. POS is POS, how useful is that stuff without a real OS backing it?
The main PDAs I've used were a Newton MP2100, a Jornada 720, and a Zaurus. The first two managed to be great for both using as a computer as well as a PDA- the Newton was 100% perfect for notetaking. The Jornada wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn good. (No reflective screen, so I had to say bye-bye)
The Zaurus is another story alltogether- it kind of sucks as both a small 'real' computer as well as a PDA. No decent notetaking app exists for it and the software can often be slow, memory-hoggish, and flakey. Oddly enough, I honestly think that there has been more Unix software ported and adapted to WinCE (which I used on my Jornada 720) than for the Zaurus. Take for instance LaTeX- I could certainly cross-compile the full distro. I could even show that I'm super l33t and run LyX under X11... But why the hell would I want to waste my time doing that? With WinCE and PocketPC, there were a couple nice packages that gave you an integrated LaTeX front-end. Tap on a button and it would compile the TeX and display it in a port of WinDVI. Not so for the Zaurus... it seems people are too busy cheerleading that no one has time for any software development.
And yes, I'm taking matters into my own hands and working on Dynapad, a PDA OE/OS which manages to already pack more functionality is a number of ways than the Zaurus does- 1 developer (me) vs all of them. Heh.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
My theory is, the faster the processor, the more programmers will take advantage of the speed.
And the more they take advantage of the speed, the shorter the battery life.
High speed processors, color screens, and bright backlighting all contribute to shorter battery life. When you are miles from home, the batteries are dead, and you have no way to sync your data back on to the device, you'll wish Palm had gone for long battery life instead of glity features.
Another point to consider: One of the strong points of Palm's handhelds has been the tremendous quantity of software available. You could take an app written for an original Palm Pilot and run it on a Palm Pilot Pro, Palm III, Palm M100, Handspring Visor, etc. The differences were largely limited to quantity of RAM and physical dimensions of the device. Sure, there were minor CPU speed variances, but it wasn't a whole new CPU at 10x-30x the clock speed. Apps for a Palm with a 400mhz ARM CPU with a 320x320 color screen won't run on the older Palms. Older apps will be unappealing to someone who has plonked down a big chunk of cash for a color, hi-res Palm. An app that requires the new Tungston C's 400mhz ARM CPU won't run fast enough on the Zire 71's 144mhz CPU.
If Palm was going to change things, they should have done it all at once, going from the original standard to a new one. Now they've got a current product line with 16mhz Dragonball CPUs, 33mhz Dragonball CPUs, 144mhz TI ARM CPUs, 400mhz Intel ARM CPUs, 160x160 monochrome screens, 160x160 grayscale screens, 160x160 color screens, and 320x320 color screens. They've really lost it.
Your requirements are pretty stiff for a PDA. I use a PDA for these things: appointments, phone numbers and email addresses, todo lists, notes, reading novels, playing games, taking notes, and listening to music. Almost any PDA will do all these things well (maybe not the music part; lots of PDAs don't do music).
You could buy a Microsoft-based PDA, a PocketPC, and that might meet your specs. However, I hate Windows CE, much preferring the Palm system.
I have a Palm Tungsten T, and I love it. But there is no 802.11b for it yet. It should otherwise meet your specs, including the ability to play MP3 and Ogg files.
Personally, I think you would be better served with a really compact laptop. If you really want to check mail, upload/download files, listen to music, remotely run things on your desktop... a laptop really is the way to go. A Lindows Notebook PC is $800, and you can always install some other OS if you don't like Lindows. You can check eBay for a used tiny notebook. You could probably get a Libretto cheap, and that's really tiny!
You might even want to get a NEC MobilePro. That's a Windows CE based subnotebook: it's like a really big PDA with a really big screen and a really big keyboard. Jerry Pournelle uses one to take notes, and he gave it his "Cold, Dead Fingers" award (as in, if you want to take it away from him you will have to pry his cold dead fingers from around it).
If you insist on something in your pocket, maybe you should check out the Zaurus PDAs. Since they run real Linux, you can make them do lots of stuff, and I hear they are great. I've never used one yet so I don't know.
Good luck.
steveha
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