Zire Handheld
Line of consumer-grade PDAs from Palm
The Zire Series was Palm, Inc's "consumer-grade" brand of Personal Digital Assistant.
Background/overview
The lower-end models emphasized value—Palm's original Zire model was the first PDA under $100 from a major manufacturer—and the higher-end models emphasized multimedia capability, including features like cameras and audio playback functions suitable for listening to MP3s.
Models
Palm Zire and Palm Zire 21
The Palm Zire and Palm Zire 21 were inexpensive and are differentiated from the rest of Palm's line by having monochrome screens without backlighting, having only two application buttons instead of the typical four, and traditional up/down scroll buttons instead of the then-standard 5-way navigator found in other models. Both of these entry-level models are lightweight (3.8oz or 108g) and sport a white plastic face with a matte gray plastic back.
The Zire (also known as the m150), released in the fourth quarter of 2002 and is the handheld responsible for starting the value-conscious handheld craze. It sported only 2 MB RAM, a 16 MHz Motorola DragonBall EZ processor, and Palm OS 4.1.x. The Zire was superseded by the Zire 21 at the release of the "First Breed of PIM Plus Handhelds" in the fourth quarter of 2003.
The Zire 21, released at the same time as the Tungsten T3 and Tungsten E, sported an improved PIM suite (then-known as the Palm PIM Plus), a 126 MHz TI OMAP311 ARM-Compliant Processor, 8 MB RAM, and Palm OS 5.2.1.
Neither the Zire nor the Zire 21 had SD/SDIO/MMC expansion, which caused the devices to be shunned by handheld aficionados. As of August 2005, both of these handhelds had been discontinued, making the Palm Zire 31 the entry-level Palm-branded PDA citing a strong demand for color.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Zire Handheld” is line of consumer-grade PDAs from Palm. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Zire, Handheld and Line, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “line of consumer-grade PDAs from Palm” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8072757. The Library of Congress control number is sh2005007139. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2003 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zire Handheld” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.