Palm Debuts the Zire 71 and Tungsten C Handhelds

Palm Solutions Group today debuted two new handhelds, the Zire 71 and Tungsten C. The Zire 71 is a new consumer model with an emphasis on multimedia, featuring a built in digital camera. The Tungsten C is aimed a Corporate Campuses and power users, with built in WiFi wireless, a 400mhz Intel XScale Processor and 64 MB of RAM.

Zire 71
Bringing multimedia capabilities to its Zire product family, Palm, today introduced the Zire 71 handheld with a built-in digital camera and Palm's sharpest high-resolution color screen to date.

Zire 71 Features
The Zire 71 runs Palm OS 5.2.1 and uses a 144MHz Texas Instruments OMAP310 (ARM) processor. The display is a 16-Bit, 320x320 bright transflective TFT color display, which supports more than 65,000 colors. It includes 16MB of internal memory (13MB is user accessible). It also features dual expansion with the Palm Universal connector and a Secure Digital (SD/SDIO/MMC) expansion slot. Palm has also incorporated a joystick like 5-way navigation button for one-handed use.

Its dimensions closed are 4.5 in. x 2.9 in. x 0.67 in. (114 x 74 x 17 mm), and weighs 5.3 oz (150 g). The Zire 71 has a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone plug for audio out and a rear mono speaker. The Zire 71 is powered by a 900mAh rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery.

Digital Camera
The Palm Zire 71 handheld's new design features a slider that reveals and activates the digital camera. The camera can capture pictures in 640x480, 320x240 and 160x120 resolution with Free focus, auto exposure and auto white balance. The display acts as the viewfinder, and snapshots can be saved within internal memory or onto expansion cards. The camera automatically activates by sliding open the device. A touch of a button underneath the slider, users can instantly capture the photo.

One of the four application buttons on the front of the Zire 71 handheld accesses Palm's new photo application for organizing and managing digital images on the handheld. Users can assemble photo albums, beam images to friends, and move pictures to and from an expansion card. The Palm Photos application also has been integrated into the Palm Desktop Windows edition, providing photo viewing, organizing and basic editing functions.

For listening to music files and playing movies, the Zire 71 handheld ships with RealOne Mobile Player and Kinoma Player and Producer. The software CD also contains Audible Player, RealOne Arcade, Palm Reader, Handmark Solitaire, Adobe Acrobat Reader for Palm OS, powerOne Personal Calcuator, SMS, PhoneLink updater and VersaMail 2.5.

"Multimedia became the focal point of our new Zire handheld because a gap exists between the people who want this functionality and the cost they have had to pay to get it," said Ken Wirt, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Palm Solutions Group.

The Palm Zire 71 is now available in retail and online outlets including the Palm Store at a MSRP of $299 USD.

Tungsten C
The Tungsten C is Palms most powerful handheld computer to date, with built-in high-speed 802.11b wireless.

The Tungsten C runs Palm OS 5.2.1 and runs on 400mhz Intel Scale PXA255 Processor. The display is a 16-Bit, 320x320 bright transflective TFT color display, which supports more than 65,000 colors. It includes 64MB of internal memory (51MB is user accessible), the most memory for a Palm OS handheld. It also features dual expansion with the Palm Universal connector and a Secure Digital (SD/SDIO/MMC) expansion slot.

The Tungsten C also has an Integrated Thumb-Size Keyboard as well as on screen Graffiti2 for data input. The Palm 5-way navigator also facilitates one-handed operation.

Its dimensions are 4.8" x 3.07" x .65". (122 x 78 x 16.5 mm), and weighs 6.3 oz (178 g). The Tungsten C uses a 2.5mm headphone plug for audio out and a rear mono speaker. There is also Vibration, Audio and LED Notification for alarms.

It is powered by a fixed 1500mAh Rechargeable Lithium Ion/Polymer battery. Which Palm says will provide a full work day of consistent Wi-Fi connectivity, or a full work week of normal handheld use.

Software
The Tungsten C handheld ships with a number of new software applications built into the device ROM including: DataViz Documents To Go Professional Edition 5.1 for Word, Excel and PowerPoint compatible document handling; VersaMail 2.5, PalmSource Web Browser 2.0, the proxyless web browser by PalmSource, Inc. that supports HTML, JavaScript and other Internet standards, Palm Photo View 1.0 a PPTP VPN client by Mergic and all of the standard Palm OS PIM applications.

Security
The Tungsten C handheld uses a Wi-Fi certified Intersil Prism 3.0 802.11b radio which supports 128-bit WEP encryption. It also ships with a built-in PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol) virtual private network client (VPN) from Mergic. Additional new security features include application-level 128-bit encryption technology which enables users to choose which applications they want encrypted. Scheduled and/or regularly timed lockouts protect data when the device isn’t in use and password-character blocking keeps bystanders from seeing on-screen passwords.

The Palm Tungsten C handheld is $499 (estimated U.S. street price) and is scheduled to be available May 5 worldwide and online at The Palm Store. Reports from the PIC forums indicate some retail stores already have units in stock.

Additional High Resolution Pictures (Click for Larger):

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