Author: Alastair Scott
Date: 11:23:50 05/10/03
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Well, I have just received my Zire 71 and, for me, "breaking the bank" is £200. So it just managed to do so (£203). But it is sensationally good - the screen is phenomenal and PalmOS 5.2 is a very impressive update (unlike with many Sony machines there are legible fonts at 320x320 resolution, for starters). The inbuilt digital camera is not bad but, really, the Zire 71 would be worth buying at the same price without it. I suspect one of the last bastions of overpricing in home computing has just collapsed. Both main PalmOS chess programs (Genius and Tiger) work perfectly on it; the first has high-resolution graphics (320x320) but the second sticks with normal (160x160) for the moment. Neither are "native"* but: i. for most players they are plenty strong enough already; ii. I suspect Messrs Lang and Theron have nice things up their sleeves :) Alastair * up until a few months ago all PalmOS machines (version 4.x and below of the operating system) used processors by Motorola. PalmOS 5 has widened this to include (at the moment) Texas Instruments and Intel, but runs older programs using emulation (!) of the Motorolas. Of course a program relying on an emulated environment is slower than a program written to exploit the new processors, but the emulation speed is actually very impressive (TigerMark 0.88 for the curious).
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