Last weekend we got a replacement for my old Handspring Visor. It had become a cat toy, and the screen was being a bit fickle about the idea of staying on. I’d been able to affect some minor improvement, but it would still blank out at inconvenient times.
Palm is doing a trade-up rebate program on two of their PDAs, the Zire and the Tungsten. The Tungsten has some great features, like wireless connectivity, but the Zire costs about $200 less and has a nifty camera concealed in the back…
…so we decided to go with the Zire.
We got it at CompUSA, and they gave us huge number of freebies, like a memory expansion card, a free case, replacement styli and so on. We got the Protection Plan, just in case the cats decide it’s time for a rematch in their hockey game, and there were even more freebies because of that. We also found a little expansion card with some games on it, most notably SimCity!
Which leads into my only complaint. The new gadget has the latest Palm OS on it, and that means it won’t run some older Palm software. Some of it is trivial stuff, like the system hack that lets you customize the startup and shutdown screens and put Star Trek style sound effects on various actions. But it also won’t run two of the games on the card. One of them is a blackjack game that I really don’t care about, but the other one that it won’t run is SimCity… Very sad.
The built in camera is nifty. It’s nowhere near the quality of the Minolta that I use for more serious stuff, but it’s extremely handy for quick snapshots. Plus it has a built in picture browser that can display .jpg images. All I need to do is either upload pictures to the Palm or put them on the little memory card and it can function as a hand-held slideshow unit.
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