- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 61 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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15 out of 16 people found this review helpful
3.0 stars
"Ok but not great value for $99."
Pros: Cheap, bright display, perfect size.
Cons: Crashes every day, like old Windows machines.
Summary: I've used a PDA for years primarily to keep my contacts and calendar synched between work and life. I also download the New York Times, Wired, etc. with Avantgo for reading during my commutes, and I play a couple games.
When my old iiiC touch screen quit working, the $99 Z22 caught my eye, even though the screen is smaller than what I'm used to.
First the pluses.
I was impressed by how easy setup was, especially configuring my PCs to synch the PDA with Outlook at work and the Palm desktop application at home. Synching with Outlook used to require a slow and expensive 3rd party add-on.
I was also delighted with the screen's brightness which more than compensated for its smaller size, especially once I figured out how to select a sharp-looking font my older eyes could see easily.
It's an ipod look-alike, and succeeds in being both cool looking and handy to carry around.
I'm less keen on the operation of the 5-way navigator control. It's a great idea, but I often find that when simply scrolling down, a click on the lower edge of the ring button either jumps down more than one screen at a time, or requires me to hold it down for a second or two before anything happens.
Here's the really bad part. The device "crashes" a lot, usually at least once a day. That means it freezes during operation, allowing none of the buttons (including power) or touch screen controls to function. Depressing the reset on the back of the device is necessary to shut down and restart. Sometimes, it freezes during reset, and requires a second reset which happily has always worked.
I thought the device might just need repair, but a little investigating revealed that this is not an unusual problem.
Crashes seem to happen mostly one of two ways. When using the 5-way navigator control, or during a synch. In the former case, the system just freezes with the display looking normal. In the latter, the display shows a kaleidoscope of colored shapes, or a cryptic message about a fatal error with hex addresses and other computer gobbledygook.
As an old-time Windows user, I'm not overly concerned about having to restart a couple of times a day. It takes less than a minute, and always works. I've never lost data or settings, but I do have to readjust the contrast after every reset.
Poor Palm. I think it's ironic they promote this as an entry-level version. Maybe Palm presumes that entry-level users won't bother with synching, or stressing the device enough to crash it very often. But if I was new to Palm, I'd drop their product line like a nail clipper at airport security. Palm might fool new users at first, but I think they won?t become loyal customers inclined to graduate to more expensive models.
I'm willing to deal with the irritating instability only because I'm used to the Palm applications. Resetting the PDA is faster than rebooting Windows and no slower than reconnecting a dropped cell call (the old and new de facto standards for tech usability).
It takes the Z22?s strong pluses combined with my experience and loyalty to just barely net out the minuses. This is a good product, but definitely not a star, and I?d steer first-time PDA users to a much more reliable - if expensive - alternative.
- 1 reply to this review
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It's odd that yours crashes every day...mine never does that. Could it be that you have some sort of program on the Palm that's causing that kind of trouble? Or maybe you deleted something you weren't supposed to. In either case, I'm sure that you could find some help by searching in Google or perhaps search in Yahoo! Answers...there are all kinds of Q&As there, and I'm sure that you could find something.
Palm Z22:
