Features:
- Bright, 320x320 transflective TFT color display supports more thank 65,000 colors
- Texas Instruments OMAP310 processor (ARM); 144 MHz
- Integrated digital camera with 640x480 resolution, auto exposure, and automatic white balance control
- SD expansion slot
- What's in the box: Zire 71 Handheld, Protective Carrying Case, USB HotSync Cradle, Power Adapter, Desktop Software CD-ROM, Software Essentials CD-ROM, Stylus
Description:
Palm’s Zire brand is designed primarily for consumers rather than for professionals. The first Zire was a low cost, entry level machine, this one, the second in the range, is a multimedia extravaganza. The most eye catching feature of the Zire 71, after you’ve noticed the sleek rounded blue casing for the hardware, is the built-in digital camera.  | The Zire 71's built-in digital camera | You need to slide the upper and lower body apart to reveal it, and when you do so the Zire 71’s screen automatically turns into a viewfinder. Click the button that is also revealed during the sliding process, and you can take pictures, at resolutions of 160 x 120, 320 x 240 and 640 x 480. Palm has even produced a new version of Palm Desktop to help you make the most of managing digital images. This includes a nice viewer and some editing tools. Palm Desktop also, incidentally, has a new installer which is more efficient than before when it comes to selecting multiple applications to send to your Palm. The Zire 71 runs version 5 of the Palm operating system, which has improved sound features. Install the provided copy of the Real One player and you can play MP3 music through headphones. Gaming is assisted by a joystick style navigation button that sits beneath the screen. But when you want to use the Zire 71 for more traditional personal information management tasks you can tap the application shortcut buttons to launch Date Book, Address Book or Note Pad. The fourth button takes you to your digital photo library. As usual these buttons can be reallocated to other applications if you like. Only 13MB of to the 16MB of memory on board is actually available for applications and data, but an SD card slot means you can add to this easily. The screen is a superb transreflective TFT type – it is the best we’ve seen on a PDA from Palm. The Universal Connector means existing peripherals like keyboards which support this should work without problems with the Zire 71. The Zire 71 is a great multimedia PDA which finally puts Palm in a position to rival Sony for its Multimedia crown. --Sandra Vogel
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