Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After 10 years Palm have finally returned to their roots and released a PDA. Not a wannabe phone/walkman/portable dvd/game console/wireless web browser/photo album/book. It's an actual, honest to God, Personal Digital Assistant. Yes, it can do some of those other things too, but I'm not having to pay for expensive features like bluetooth and hifi quality audio. The Z22 is being marketed as an entry level PDA. But that's wrong. I am a long time PDA user who has owned, among other devices, a Palm Pilot Professional, an m505, a Zire 71 and a Tungsten T3. But this is my favourite device of all. For a start it's the best looking PDA ever sold. Palm must have taken a leaf out of Apple's book. When I look at my Z22 I think it could have dropped out of the clean futuristic sets of movie like 2001. This is the future that Stanley Kubrick promised us and never arrived. But at least my Palm looks like it's from that future. It's also light due to not being weighed down by a metal case and a ton of hardware I don't want. It does all the usual PDA stuff well: Calendar, Memos, Contacts and so on. 32MB is completely adequate for these tasks, even if you decide to add photos to your contact list. For these tasks the hardware is completely up to the task. I also use my Z22 for reading eBooks. It's great for this. 160x160 is enough for completely clear text. Unfortunately I do miss one feature of my T3 - the SD card slot. Without this I can't use my unabridged Webster's dictionary that weighs in at 37MB. But the 10MB Webster's is good enough for most tasks. One place where I feel Palm have cut corners is the display. There are sometimes unsightly vertical streaks in it, I'm guessing due to using a poor digital-to-analogue converter. For most tasks this isn't an issue. Photos can look a little ugly however and you often see aliasing artifacts. One place where the poor display quality is visible is when you read books in autoscroll mode. The display really isn't fast enough to keep up with scrolling text. But hey, this device costs $100 new! The device has only 2 application buttons instead of the usual 4. Surprisingly I haven't noticed the loss at all. There are a couple of other annoyances that are common to almost all current PDAs so I'll just list them quickly: difficult to replace battery, display not visible in sunlight (unlike my Palm Pilot), use of Graffiti2/Jot making reliable text entry next to impossible (Palm won the lawsuit, bring back Graffiti 1!). Palm have dropped the universal connector in favour of a new small USB port. That means I can't use my old peripherals. I do hope I can use my wireless keyboard however, when Palm release Z22 drivers. By paring down the PDA to its essentials Palm have made a winner. But there's one feature I would have liked to have kept - the SD card slot. Providing such a slot would at least have given a choice about how much to spend on storage. But like I say, apart from the dictionary I don't miss it that much. (Hmmm...I have to admit that I did enjoy playing Infocom games on my T3 using Clifrotz too, but I'll survive...)