Jan/Feb 2004

As Pocket PC-based handheld computers drop in price, Palm has hit back by reducing the retail price of its Zire 71 colour model from £229 to £179, and has announced a new and more powerful budget model, the Zire 21.

The monochrome 21 maintains the £99 price point of the previous model, but has four times the storage capacity of the original (8MB, with 7.2MB available to users), a faster 126MHz Texas Instruments microprocessor, and new and more powerful versions of Palm's PIM (personal information management) software.

The original Zire handheld is said to have been the fastest-selling handheld in the company's history. More than 1 million units were sold in its first seven months.

The Zire 71, which also has MP3 music and video capabilities, looks like a more direct a Pocket PC competitor. But according to Jad Yauri, managing director of mobile solutions developer and integrator Xcellenet: "Only a handful of the 200 companies with whom we're currently developing mobile solutions have chosen the Palm rather than the Pocket PC platform."

That might imply a clear division of sales between business and consumer markets, although now that Pocket PCs start at as little as £140 retail, the picture is not as simple as that. In any case, Palm continues to target business as well as domestic users, especially in the office marketplace where the bounds between the two types of use tend to blur.