Palm Zire 72

Palm Zire 72, no my Belgian friends this is not a new beer brewed by the Belgian brewery Palm, but a PDA with a built-in camera.

A couple of years ago I won a Palm m105 during a course at IBM and I really used it a lot. But the m105 didn't have an internal battery, so I used these rechargeable ones. But sometimes I forgot to sync with my PC and lost all my data when the batteries went down. So I was looking for a new one with a built-in battery and a USB cable so it could charge from that one as well.

I work for the research department for a big French telecommunication company and our division bought these Zire 72's to play with. So I grabbed one and tried it out... . And I love it !!!

Palm Zire 72
(Yes it's blue)

What you notice right away is the blue colour, it's some kind of coating which unfortunately can be damaged easily. So after a few days of intensive use, near the stylus holder the plastic coating was gone. A colleague of mine bought a second hand one for himself where the blue coating was already fully removed. At first he was glad he had a nice grey one, but when we looked closer we saw some blue spots, ... yes the blue plastic coating.

1.2 megapixel

The back of the Zire is made of metal and has a 1.2 megapixel camera, which you can use to take pictures with or you can also use it to make small movie clips. But for these movie clips (asf - format) you need to pop-in an SD-card in the SDIO-slot on the top. The camera is nice to fool around with but the quality isn't that good, all pictures have a rather green look.

You can also use the Zire as a MP3 player, again pop-in an SD-card stuffed with songs and you have turned your PDA into a small jukebox. You don't even need a head-set, the speaker at the back is good enough to play the music. Although if you have a good head-set it's better to use it.

Another thing I like is bluetooth 1.1, so you can use the Zire to look up a contact and then through bluetooth you connect to your GSM and you can call the person, send an SMS or whatever you have in mind.

For the rest its Palm, if you love it you are certainly going to love this one. For technical specifications go to the PalmOne web site, it isn't something I want to talk about ... .

All I want to say : go and get it buster :-)