I bought a Palm Zire at Fry’s Electronics last night. It was on sale for $89.
I lost my trusty old Palm V in November and have been miserable without it for the past 6 weeks. One of the reasons it took me so long to get a replacement was that I saw it as an opportunity to purchase some hot new technology. I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell Axim X5 for a while since I’ve been meaning to play with a handheld Microsoft OS, but I already know the Palm Desktop user interface and I’m too lazy to learn how to use Outlook. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks and all.
In the end, there’s nothing hot or new about the Zire. It’s a monochrome device with a wimpy 2MB of RAM and has absolutely no expansion capability whatsoever. The other extreme would’ve been to go with the Tungsten, but it’s kinda absurd to spend more on a handheld than you do on a desktop computer.
If it’s any help, I’ve dealt with several incarnations of WindowsCE and found that they all suffer from pretty much the same problem. They’re not simple enough. The combination of over-helpfulness and lack of battery life made me try life with a Clie. I now prefer it over the micro-laptops.
I’ll say the opposite. I’ve got a PocketPC 2002 device, and while I’m not a fan of Microsoft on my desktop, the PocketPC approaches the Newton level of functionality. Admittedly, there is a bit of a learning curve, and it takes a little patience to understand some if its quirks, but within a week it became indespensable to me.
That said, if you’re not big on the wireless internet thing, then that level of functionality is pretty much what an old Palm, a small doodling pad and a couple paperback books will buy ya.
Now that I’m all sync’d up, I browsed around for a couple of Palm apps. I took a look again at the Vindigo website last night, and have been slightly regretting my decision to get a Palm Zire.
The fact that I’ve only got 2 MB of RAM (instead of the 8 that comes with most more expensive Palm products) means that I’d use up my entire system memory just to store the Los Angeles data.
Oh well. Those 2 MB are doing a great job of storing my addressbook and calendar, and that’s 95% of what I needed a PDA for anyways.
Another plus is that I’m not tempted to spend the $25/year for the service. I’m saving money!
The inability to expand the 2 MB is a pitty. However, I’m really fond of the IR functionality, especially in combination with my IR cellphone. Sending SMS, email and other messages makes up for the loss of memory.
Good news : palm zire can be upgraded from 2MB to 8MB RAM. See the following links about
the upgrade :
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpdassi.de%2Fshownews.php%3Fnews_id%3D607%26SID%3D41795249e523e9a6665eaedec2dbdfb5&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
and the company that is doing it:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vivomobile.de%2Fde%2Fpreise.html&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools