Palm - Z22 Review
This is not a new product, but it's worth a review because it might possibly become one of the last PDAs ever made. By PDA we mean a 'personal digital assistant' that is not also a phone.
A classic PDA from the HP iPAQ range - which is pretty much your only other option for a non-phone PDA these days - will have a touch-sensitive screen that measures three or four inches on the diagonal and will offer you Wi-Fi and the ability to sync with your Windows PC. In its time the PDA offered a handy way to take your e-mail, contact list and calendar on your travels but these days you can get most of those features from any decent Smart Phone.
That's great if you're a techno-junky who sports an iPhone in one jacket pocket and an HTC TyTN II in the other, but the fact is that a great many people have a mobile phone that is fit for little more than making phone calls and sending text messages. This is where the tiny Palm Z22 enters the equation as it offers you the chance to carry your data with you at a low cost. Which is to say that £75 is cheap by the standards of the PDA market but it's a hefty down-payment on a Smart Phone.
The Z22 has the advantage of being small at 68 x 103 x 15mm and it's also rather light in weight at 96g. On the downside the screen is also fairly small and measures 2.4 inches on the diagonal with a resolution of 160x160, which makes it inferior to most phones.
The hardware behind the Z22 doesn't look too impressive as it consists of a 200MHz Samsung ARM-based processor with 32MB of memory. It's saved by the Palm OS Garnet 5.4 Operating System which has a smaller footprint than Windows Mobile and as a result it is pleasantly responsive.
These features combine to give a battery life of a week, which is better than most PDAs and phones can manage, but when you consider the low specification you'd hope for nothing less.
As the list of features is very short, the only options for communication are the USB port and infra-red, without a sniff of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Palm doesn't include software such as an Internet Browser but it does supply the Graffiti 2 handwriting recognition software that is well-loved by Palm aficionados. Curiously enough Palm also includes a photo viewer, yet there is no SD card slot so you're limited to using 20MB out of the total of 32MB of memory for your photos.
There's another piece of software on the Z22 called Crazy Daisy, which is an amusing game that will help you to distract a bored child for a few minutes. And that's your lot.
