palmOne Releases Two New Zire Handhelds

wPageUp writes "palmOne today announced two new additions to their consumer Zire PDA line. According to PalmInfoCenter, the Zire 72 has a 1.2 MP digital camera, 32MB of ram and a 312MHz Intel processor for $299. On the low end side, the new Zire 31 is the first sub-$150 color handheld to include MP3 audio and a memory expansion slot."

Comments

Re:Only EU has growing market for PDA's

[boogy nightmare]

Agreed, how ever for taking notes i use the voice recorder and then add it in later via the bluetooth link and software on the PC. This is where phones like the P900 (and to a lesser extent the p800) work, although more expensive they have the same input type as the PDA, with stylus and touch screen.

However when i use SMS the use of predictive texting has about an 80% first time hit rate and in the hands of a average texter is not a disadvantage over a small qwerty keyboard, seriously, if you have not watched some of the kids today type on those keyboards its very fast, i think one Japanese girl hit something like 95wpm.

PalmOne

[Mr_Silver]

I considered submitting this story yesterday but thought that someone else already did.

Looking around the offices in the past 5 years I'm seeing less and less people using Palm's and those that are have the old Vx's or 50x series. Almost everyone who has a PDA these days has a PocketPC. Even I moved from a Vx to an iPaq and probably won't go back.

If I did then it would be if

1. Support of the fields that Outlook has is better than on a PocketPC. Sure I can install another application (KeySuite) but then I can't integrate that data with other applications.
2. A decent today screen with plugins. I don't want something flexible that allows me to define what my today screen shows and the order that it shows it.
3. Continious syncing. This is a big one for me. If I take my PDA out of the cradle then I want to know that it is up-to date at that very moment in time. This is especially important when I have someone else managing my diary so I don't necessarily know when I have to sync. I do not want to have to remember to press the "sync" button 5 minutes before I want to take the PDA to a meeting.

Palm kind of remind me of Apple, in the sense that they have only a few people making their hardware. Microsoft on the other hand has a large number of hardware manufacturers which means that they are pushing the specifications further and quicker than Palm are.

Camera, Bluetooth, wireless networking - all came from the PocketPC first because there was competition from the hardware manufacturers to differentiate their product from others. With Palm, there isn't quite so much of a need and so I get the feeling they're playing catch up (even though their screen resolution is better than the PocketPC's - but still no virtual grafitti area)