New Toy: Palm Zire 72s

Thanks to Overstock.com and their great prices, I picked myself up a shiny Palm Zire 72 Silver Special Edition. I know they were recently discontinued and replaced with the TX, Tungsten and LifeDrive kinds of handhelds, but the Zire 72 is a full-featured Palm with everything I need/want to organize my life. It’s got a crisp, clear screen, 1.3 mega-pixel camera, Bluetooth and and SD card expansion slot. It’s great. Syncs well with my Mac’s iCal and Address Book with a little help from iSync. If I want to go mobile, I can WAP through Bluetooth on my phone. There are, however some well known inconsistencies with synced data, namely with categories, but that doesn’t affect me much.

Many years ago, I aquired a Palm IV unit, but it was unusable as I couldn’t quite get the whole Graffiti input letter shapes and such. Graffiti 2, which the Zire 72 uses, is way easier to use, I haven’t had any troubles even without reading the Graffiti 2 instructions. Well done Palm.

Since I didn’t like the Palm IV much, I tried PocketPC. Got an HP Jornada 548… big mistake. Cost me around $300 and I made this choice over the Compaq iPaq because the specs looked better. Then, like a week after I got it, they discontinued it and stopped supporting it. Then the iPaq became the PocketPC to have as I was reminded by the suckiness of my Jornada that HP should stick with printers. It was heavy, slow and needed frequent resets… and only synced with Microsoft’s apps.

For the longest time I had my eyes on the Treo 650, but my mobile carrier, T-Mobile, recently stopped carrying these units. Don’t really want the hassle of trying to unlock one to use with T-Mobile or buy a used one, and it’s probably better in the long run as I hear the Treo is a great PDA but a sub-par phone… that’s just what I’ve heard.

One my my goals this year is to get organized with everything and my Zire 72 is going to be a great tool for helping me do so.