Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 17:15:40 01/26/05
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On January 26, 2005 at 19:14:07, Steve B wrote: >Your Thoughts?? > >http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=56413&item=5160475939 > > >Best >Steve NO GO at this price. This is the the first Zire than runs at 16Mhz. About 20x faster is the Zire 31 which normally runs runs at 200 Mhz and may runs as high 300 Mhz overclocked(ymmv). It is newer, it comes like new with maybe minor blemishes (mine had none) , has the OS 5.2.8 , xscale processor and is in color. (ODAs are much more fun in color , having owned both Palm and Pocket PC in gray scale. They have raised their refurbished price by $10 , since I initially touted the this unit back in December. Both Genius and HIARCS take advantage of the Xscale and play at amzaing strength for a unit that weighs so little. HIARCS is pricier, but it has a neat feature that tracks your rating and % of wins, games played. In addition, it is clearly the strongest program for the Palm on the xscale processor. I still think PF2 gives it a run for its money as the games that are published as played between HIARCS and PDF2, it appears that the most optimal settings were not used for PF2 (IMO, based on the book lines played by PF2). But HIARCS is optimized for the xscale processor, PF2 is not, thus I give the nod to HIARCS for the being the strongest available program for an xcale PDA, either PPC or PALM. See this post about a free program to overclock the Zire Xscale and comparisions between the Zire 31 and much pricier Palms. http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?407358 Note: if you do get the Palm Zire, I also suggest getting Chess Genius as that is also optimized for the Palm xscale processor. Chess Tiger is also fun to play and will challenge most players, but the program is currently not optimized for the Xscale. Christopher has indicated to me that it is on his list of things to do, but it may be a while before we see it. HIARCS and Genius are very impressive on an xscale processor and I believe HIARCS will challenge evem most GMs running full strength (pondering enabled) running on latest PDA processors. Kudos to my ex-fellow employee (although we worked on different continents when we were both at Nortel) Mark Uniacke! I set it for 1 second, running full stregnth in all other respects at 300 Mhz , no pondering, playing about a 10/15 minute per game pace on my side, and I can capture ~15% of the points. Just enough to make it interesting for me. With that setting, the battery will last a very long time and that is one of the reasons that even if you are not a 2200 player, it makes sense to buy the strongest PDA available so that you can maximize the battery usage by reducing the time settings. On a 30 minute train ride , there is no measurable battery usage at the one second per move setting. Best, Michael
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