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Personal Digital Adventure - Part 4

September 20, 2003

Rumour became fact as Palm announced the Palm Tungsten C and the Palm Zire71.

Tale of two PDAs

The Tungsten C was probably everything a business person would want. 64 MB of memory, a fantastic high-resolution colour screen, and two rather unusual things: no Graffiti writing area (and a small mini keyboard instead), and wireless (WiFi) connectivity. All this came with two “warts” - a high price (street price $500) and monophonic sound.

However, the lure of a wireless PDA is almost irresistible. Wireless hotspots were springing up all over the world - at a airports, in offices, at coffee shops, at home. Imagine being connected all the time, being able to pick up the latest news, the newest information, anything.

Reality check - while WiFi was most certainly the most important technology direction in the world at this point, it wasn’t really that easy to use and configure or even to find. PKR couldn’t find a WiFi hot spot at the airport on the way to the USA, and I knew from experience that it would take close to a year for such ease of connectivity to become reality in the places I would be moving in.

Would a WiFi-enabled PDA make sense here? Probably not. Had the unit included Bluetooth (another popular wireless method that was quickly replacing Infrared, and that existed in the previous Tungsten T model), one could have at least fallen back to GPRS via one’s cellphone, but no Bluetooth option existed for the Tungsten C.

The other factor was the way I used my PDA, which is much more personal in nature than people were expected to use this wireless-connected unit. For me, a PDA is an information store and an entertainment centre, rather than a gateway to live information and limited entertainment.

So while the Tungsten C looked very attractive to me on the surface, I decided to ask PKR to change plans, and pick up a Palm Zire 71 instead.

My latest “toy”

The Zire71 was everything I wanted in a personal digital assistant. More memory (well, 16 MB, of which 14 MB was usable), a fantastic high-resolution colour screen that was bright enough to be read totally comfortably in bright sunlight (or use as a room light in the night!), an expansion card port that allowed me to increase storage by using tiny Secure Digital cards (I got a 32 MB card with the unit, and immediately ordered myself another one sized 256 MB), full stereo MP3 playback capabilities (either through a small speaker at the rear of the unit, or through standard stereo headphones), the latest PalmOS 5.2 that fixed a huge number of issues from previous versions, and something I didn’t think I would need, but got anyway, since it was part of the unit - a camera.

I have been using digital cameras since 1999, and was under no illusions about the capabilities of the little thingy that was part of the Zire71. No flash, no zoom, no controls other than the shutter release. Maximum resolution of 640×480. I have seen toys with more features.

Except that I haven’t seen toys that travel with me wherever I went, ready for action when needed. No cursing about leaving the camera behind on this trip - whip out the PDA, and click.

Amazingly, while quality of pictures definitely didn’t approach the prosumer quality of my Kodak digital cameras, the pictures this little thing produced were much better than I had hoped to see. What had at first appeared to be a rather unnecessary gimmick, turned out to be a genuinely useful tool. I realized this as I bent over a paper document and used the camera to take a snap for later reading (a la James Bond), and when I used it to snap the contents of a whiteboard after a discussion.

The MP3 player part of it was a bit of a disappointment at first. The Zire71 can only play MP3 files (of which I own thousands) if stored on the expansion card. With only a small 32 MB card at hand, I found myself struggling to shoe-horn even 8 songs (or about 30 minutes worth music) into the PDA.

That explains the decision to order a larger storage card - based on the encoding rate I used, I would be able to carry between 2-4 hours of music with me on the larger card. And I could, of course, always acquire more cards - they are so small that they don’t take up any room at all.

Also, being a purchase from Europe (PKR picked it up at Heathrow Airport), the unit was subject to European volume-cap - which is considerably lower than stuff sold in the USA (other stereo equipment like portable CD, cassette and MP3 players are also subject to this cap, including the Apple iPod).

This means that the output of the unit was pretty low compared to what I was used to from other personal stereo devices. Palm did not included a pair of earphones matched to the Zire 71, which meant that I had to go through a series of different earphones before I found one that produced sufficient loudness and depth of sound.

This lead to a very memorable flame war on one of the mailing lists I was subscribed to, when I mentioned the low output, and all the Americans screamed that I didn’t know what I was talking about (at that time, none of the participants, including me, knew about the difference in output between European and American personal stereo devices).

Anyway, once I had a matching set of earphones, and MP3 playback software that could give output a bit of a pseudo-boost (the included RealPlayer software was OK, but it took Aeroplayer to really make this unit shine), I was more than happy with what I had.

The Screen

But the best thing (from my perspective) was the screen. As I said before - it was bright enough to be read in broad daylight, but then “bright” has different meanings for different things.

To understand this, look at the images you see if you shine a torch on a picture - you get to see details, but what you really see is a lot of light, most of it wasted unless you really get the right angle.

Now imagine the picture itself being luminous. Imagine a flat sheet of paper in front of you that is sheer white and glowing bright. Any details on this paper are going to be gloriously bright, colourful and easy to see and read.

That is the difference between the “colour” screens most PDAs were offering at that time, and the screen of the Zire 71. While most PDA screens were LCDs with light shining on them, the Zire 71 screen was (in effect) shining on its own - like the screen of a standard CRT-based PC monitor.

So here we are

So here we are. As I sit writing these words (in September 2003), the Zire 71 has been everything that I expect of a PDA.

Since March, I have read countless books on it (thanks to the great screen, that is no longer a pain even at night), played back innumerable MP3s, played some really amazing full-colour, high resolution games, had my behind paddled by a rather vicious robot-opponent at Monopoly and Scrabble, sucked down megabytes of news and information everyday via Avantgo, and taken photos that I wouldn’t have expected to capture.

My little piece of technological miracle that travels everywhere with me has more than paid for itself, and I watched with glee as more and more PalmOS based devices started hitting the market - including watches, game consoles, GPS devices, phones and of course more and more PDAs.

That brings to an end a rather lengthy article, and I hope you have enjoyed this Personal Digital Adventure of mine. Expect more PDA-related articles soon - I have so much to tell you about how I use my PDA, what applications I use, what situations I have found myself in where the PDA came to my rescue, and more.

Maybe, just maybe, this set of articles will convince you to start using a PDA as well? ;-)

Comments»

1. Vasudev Ram - June 10, 2006

I bought a Zire 71 with 16 MB (from the US, so good volume) and then a year later, a Zire 72 with 32 MB. Its pretty good. Hadn’t used the MP3 player much though - thanks for sharing your experience, I’ll check that out now. I use the camera a lot, and the photos are decent. I have some of them up on my Flickr account here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vram

Another good point about the Zire is the Documents to Go software - allows you to read / write Office Docs - Word and Excel - on the Zire, and up/download them between it and a PC. A PDF viewer is also built in.

Have you tried the video feature?