There's a new Zire in town, the camera-sporting, mp3-playing Zire 71. Larry Garfield looks at this new monster of the mid-range and decides he really likes what he sees.
Last fall, Palm's Zire set a new low for handhelds; in price that is. But it quickly led to the belief that the Zire would be Palm's "low end" line and the Tungsten would be the "high end" line. Palm's new Zire 71 should do away with that image, as it offers once of the nicest consumer mid-price packages we've seen to date.
 | The Zire 71 has a good camera and the best screen to date
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Design
The Zire 71 has the same overall body design as its smaller sibling, only a bit thicker at 11.4 x 7.3 x 1.7 cm and weighing in at 150 grams. That gives it a very nice feel in the hand, as the mostly curving case lets the device rest easily in the palm or on fingers. The back of the case is a bright silver plastic, while the front is a not-unattractive dusty blue. Although the case is the same width as the original Zire, the screen itself is much wider, nearly the entire width of the device, to give a more traditional screen size.
And what a screen it is. The Zire 71 debut's Palm's new transflective TFT screen design, which takes our breath away. It is a 320x320 pixel 16-bit color screen, with a nearly infinite viewing angle. Colors are rich, contrast is good, brightness is top-notch, and the refresh rate is solid. When we first saw the Zire 71's screen, we thought it was a painting, not an actual LCD screen. It's that good. Palm has leap-frogged past Sony in the screen department, and we hope they keep using this screen in all of their new models. Our one and only issue is that it doesn't include Virtual Graffiti support.
Below the Graffiti are are the usual four application buttons, although Palm has remapped the ToDo button to "Photos". (The ToDo application is still included.) More on that later. Between them is Palm's 5-Way Navigator control, albeit with a new design. Rather than the D-Pad setup of the Tungsten line, the Zire 71 has a 5-way pointing stick controller. It's usable, but we far prefer the proper D-Pad as the pointing stick is a bit slick and sometimes hard to control. We'd even prefer the shrunken version of the Tungsten W, in order to keep the control small. Fortunately it is software-compatible with the Tungsten D-Pad, so software written for one will work fine on the other and vice-versa.
The novel part of the Zire 71 is when it opens. The front half of the handheld slides up about 2 cm to reveal a 640x480 camera in back and a large shutter button in front. Opening the device starts the camera application, which is not accessible otherwise, and closing it leaves the user in the Photos application. While there is no flash and the shutter speed is a bit low, the automatic brightness, contrast, and white balance features are very good and almost compensate for the lack of a flash. The camera saves pictures to either RAM or a Secure Digital card. It can also add a date-stamp to each picture, although we would far prefer a date-stamp on the file name where it's more useful and doesn't get in the way.
We took two test photos with the Zire 71 at 640x480 resolution with all auto-adjustments enabled. The camera fared well in sunlight and at night. For comparison, the same scene taken with the Sony CLIE PEG-NZ90 and PEG-NX70v is also available.
On top of the device is a large, comfortable power button, stereo headphone jack, IR port, SD slot, and the stylus silo. The IR port is still the normal strength, so universal remote programs are still mostly a novelty here, unfortunately. The stylus is a simple all-plastic affair, which is disappointing. For a device this nice, we'd have expected a nice metal barrel stylus not a cheap plastic stylus like the original Zire.
Audio quality through the main speaker in back was very good. Through the stereo headphone jack, it was even better, on par with most other advanced-audio-sporting devices on the market.
Connectivity
The Zire 71 includes only the basic connectivity features. It has the standard IR port, as mentioned, and of course the Palm-standard lone SD slot. At the bottom of the case is the expected Palm Universal Connector for the included cradle and accessories. The cradle is the same design Palm has been using for two years now, complete with the wall-brick power adapter that we dislike so much.
Noticeably absent is Bluetooth. We're surprised that Palm left it out, given the Zire 71's positioning as a mid- to high-end consumer device for 20-somethings. Most 20-somethings have cellular phones, and with a growing number of accessories using Bluetooth connectivity we expected to see it here.
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