At lunch today, I stopped by the local Fry's Electronics and tried out PalmOne's two new devices, the low-end Zire 31 and the middle-of-the-road Zire 72.
First, both devices are attractive. The Zire 31 fixes a lot of the problems with the low-end Zire units, including better placement of the power and sync ports, a SD card slot, and five-way navigation. The screen isn't very good; it has a limited viewing angle, and it suffers from slow update speeds. However, it does seem good enough for basic use, picture viewing, and PIM apps. I wouldn't want to read ebooks for hours on this, but as a very small, light device it works well. While the packaging advertises picture viewing, it looks like the software has to be loaded from CD, as it wasn't on the demo unit. I tried beaming a JPEG file to the device, but there was no handler installed. While this device only has two application buttons, this should be OK for gaming, since the five-way is also there.
The Zire 72 was gorgeous, with a deep royal blue color and a non-slip skin that felt good in the hand. The screen looked very nice, and was similar to the screens on the Zire 71 and Tungsten C. I liked the ergonomics of the application buttons and five-way navigator. The Camera app is launched on the first button press, while later presses toggle between the Camera and Media applications. I can't comment on camera quality, as I didn't beam any pictures off the device for keeping, but they looked pretty good on-device.
Both devices have updated PIM apps and a slightly refreshed launcher. I like the ability to put a picture in the background of the launcher. The dialog to set the picture has a built-in control to let you reduce the contrast of the background picture, a very welcome feature. However, I'm disappointed that they didn't update other parts of the launcher while working on it. I've always thought that the categorization dialog was hard to use; a simple change to sort the applications by their category when entering the dialog would make it a lot simpler to locate "Unfiled" apps and apply a category.
PalmOne continues to hook their own enhancements into Palm Desktop. I downloaded the 4.1.4 Windows desktop build yesterday, but I've not yet installed it. When I do, I'll post a report on how well it works with older PalmOne devices, as well as ones from other licensees.