Handhelds

[StupidCatOfDoom]

Today, I review the Palm Zire 72 Handheld.

The Zire 72 is much like the 71, it seems at first, so people wonder why they should upgrade.

These are the specs:

SD/MMC card support
Bluetooth
Microphone and camera, to record videos
Hi-res screen
312 MHz Intel® PXA270 processor
new layout and colour theme
IR port


The Zire 72 costs £219, which is good, considering it's such a high-performance handheld.

When I saw it, I longed for it. I can imagine playing Warfare Incorporated or Daedalus 3D with Eminem Ragtime playing in the background.

The 72 has a lot, and if you bought a Pocket PC ( :mad: ) like that, you'd probably have to pay waaaay more.

I'm not a very good reviewer, so I'll finish this with some Piccies:
http://www-5.palmone.com/uk/en/img/products/zire72/photos/tt1.jpg
http://www-5.palmone.com/uk/en/img/products/zire72/photos/tt2.jpg
(I'd give you some better pics, but I haven't bought the 72 yet :) )
Ooh, I forgot, the camera has a 1.2 megapixel resolution.

The only con I have, is that the 72 I tried in the store had a greenish tint to the pictures created by the camera.

[Eridanus]

Zire 71

IT TAKES PICTURES.
Well, that was impresive when i got it years ago. The camera is neatly hidden away on the back with a sliding mechanism, well my doesn't slide so smoothly anymore with all the grit that has got trappped in there....
It has handy buttons. Or mine did have until too much Sonic the hedgehog caused them to be damaged.
The screen... has... colour. And mine still does!
It has a whoel 13.2MB of useable memory....

:rolleyes: This may be why they don't make them anymore.
I would show you a picture but I use it for most of my picture taking so i can't. And your probably better off for it.

[StupidCatOfDoom]

Palm T|X

I just got a Palm T|X for christmas and I have to say i'm very pleased with it :) with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, it's very good for browsing the web, chatting on MSN, checking for Emails, streaming internet radio, and playing multiplayer games. It's a lot like the palmOne LifeDrive, but with only 128megs NVFS memory instead of a 4-gig hard drive. But reading all the comments about the LifeDrive, I would say that the T|X is a much more well-made Palm. Apparently the LD runs slower than the T|X due to HDD access times, the battery life is shorter (due to the HDD also), it's bulkier (ditto, HDD), and has a tendency to crash while switching between apps (may be HDD related :P). The T|X is very slim, and it might not have 4gigs of internal storage, but 100mb is fine for me.

The CPU is an Intel XScale runs at 312mhz - not as fast as the T5 or the LD, but i've tested overclocking it on Quake. It still runs stably at around 720MHz - twice it's original speed plus an extra ~100MHz! And Quake can be pretty picky; too. Quake'll only run once after a reset, then it resets the T|X again...but oh well. Apparently (theoretically; if you upped the voltage or something, therefore voiding the warranty and probably melting your PDA), you can clock the Sony Clié NX70V to 1.5GHz... and that runs at 200MHz. I reckon the T|X could clock up to 1.7GHz - the same speed as my desktop comp! (Even though nothing on PalmOS could possibly need that much processing power... Doom3 perhaps? :P)

The screen isn't as bright as my old Zire 71; but I would say it's nearly as bright, and the colour is comfortably vibrant. And it hasn't developed the infamous screen whine most palms have (yet). It has a virtual graffiti area instead of a real one, so you can hide it if you need more space on the screen. And a status bar stays up with handy things on it like the time, options to toggle bluetooth & wifi, any alerts you have, screen rotations etc. Oh, and yeah...you can press a button on the area and the screen changes from landscape to portrait. Very handy for doing things like watching videos. I've also found that there's less screen glare and the screen isn't as reflective as my Zire, or most Palms, and it makes it easier to use outdoors or in bright areas.

The speaker is plenty loud, so loud you don't want to use it as an alarm in the morning... it'll give you a headache if you have the volume up full! And headphones/earphones are plenty loud, too.

The Wi-Fi performance is good. Apparently Wi-Fi will drain the battery a lot quicker if you're using it lots; but I don't think so. Not if you set it up to conserve power, anyways. And there's not really any point in not conserving power - maybe a very small boost in signal strength and speed, but I haven't noticed a difference. The signal range is good, and it's sufficiently fast.

I haven't been able to test Bluetooth, just look around the settings for it etc., and it looks interesting. I haven't got a bluetooth adapter or a phone to test it on.

The battery life is good. I did a stress test on it using Quake multiplayer for 15 mins. I had it overclocked to 624MHz, wifi on full power, the backlight on full, volume up high, and when I gave up after being beaten on Quake by my little sis, the battery level had only gone down 15%!

The battery has more capacity than my old Zire, and I can underclock it to 144Mhz; which is sufficient for most apps to run while wifi's on, with VeriChat (chat app which connects to MSN, AIM/ICQ, Yahoo) and pTunes running in the background. At 144MHz, the battery lasts ages no matter what you use your TX for. After a full charge, if you ran it non-stop with WiFi on, the unit would last about 3-4 hours. Without Wi-Fi, ~6 hours. Palm say that the battery should last 5 days on normal usage (20mins wifi usage, 20mins without wifi doing something per day). The battery charges quick enough; and you can trickle-charge it by USB as well as charge it properly using the charging thingy (um).

The size of the unit is good - it's thinner than my '71, but with a bigger screen and wifi, bluetooth, more memory, longer lasting battery etc. It's a bit wider than the 71, but that's mainly because of the screen. It's also longer, also due to the screen. Overall, it's slimmer but bigger than the 71, because of it's big screen.

I don't get why Palm make the faster devices with much more features the "Professional" ones, and the cheaper, slower ones the "Consumer" ones. I find gaming on the TX a lot better due to the bigger screen, multiplayer capabilities, louder speaker and faster CPU. It also has an okay-ish application heap; around 3 to 4 megs as opposed to the Z71's 900k =X. And you can use UDMH to increase it loads...upto 90mb, since UDMH can use all your free storage memory.

The TX uses the latest version of PalmOS Garnet - v5.4.9. I just wish Palm would release the ROM for Cobalt so I can somehow stick it on my TX. I'm happy with the OS though, it's fast, simple, slick...the only thing I have qualms about is the time it takes to reboot. 15 seconds. But it's a great improvement compared to the T5's sluggish 32 SECONDS :O

Here's some specs I stole from PalmInfoCenter.com:
Size & Weight: 4.76 x 3.08 x .61 inches (120x78x15.5 mm); 5.25 oz (149g)
Processor: 312 MHz Intel PXA270
Operating System: Palm OS Garnet v5.4.9
Memory: 128 MB nonvolatile RAM; (100 MB user accessible)
Expansion: SD/SDIO/MMC slot
Screen: 320x480 pixel; 65k-color; transflective back-lit
Audio: stereo headset jack; rear speaker
Power: Built in Rechargable Li-Ion Poly (1250 mAh)
Connectivity: Multi-Connector, IrDA, Bluetooth (v1.1), Wi-Fi (802.11b)

And here be pics:
http://scodtv.x10hosting.com/IMAG0001.JPGhttp://scodtv.x10hosting.com/IMAG0002.JPG
http://scodtv.x10hosting.com/IMAG0003.JPGhttp://scodtv.x10hosting.com/IMAG0004.JPG
http://scodtv.x10hosting.com/IMAG0005.JPG

And some links to some very useful softwares:
http://yoyofr.fr.st - Home of ZQuake, ZHexen, ZDoomZ etc...
http://www.palmpowerups.com - Home of warpSpeed (overclocking app), UDMH, SkinUI etc
http://www.palmopensource.com
http://www.freewarepalm.com
http://www.palmgear.com
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=8140 - PalmInfoCenter's review of the TX. Better than mine.