PalmOne now has two distinct PDA ranges: the Tungstens, aimed primarily at the business user: and the Zires, which are targeted more at consumers. At the top end of the Zire range sits this new Zire 72, a follow-up to the Zire 71, whose sliding case hid a built-in digital camera.

PalmOne has decided that the slider hid the camera rather too well, and has abandoned that mechanism this time around, though the camera is still here, its lens sitting on the back of the casing. It captures images at resolutions up to an impressive 1,280 x 960 pixels.

You can go down in four resolution steps to 160 x 120 - ideal for sending images as MMS messages using the built-in Bluetooth and a capable mobile phone. You can also capture video at 320 x 240 or 160 x 120. Video is saved directly to an SD card rather than the internal memory of the Zire.

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In fact, this is a very multimedia-aware PDA, with the RealOne MP3 player built in, a voice recorder, and even the ability to overlay photos onto the Application Launcher screen for that bit of personalisation. And you can attach images to contacts too if you really need to, though this always appears to be a bit of a gimmick in the real world.

This being a PDA with Bluetooth there are plenty of Internet and e-mail options, including PalmOne's very serviceable e-mail client, VersaMail, and PalmOne Messages, an integrated SMS and MMS manager.

Best of the bunch, perhaps, is Web Pro, a clever little Web browser which can show an entire page in miniature on screen ready for you to tap at the area you want to zoom in on. This really does beat scrolling around in a PDA-sized window to find the bit of a Web page you want to home in on. And there is a neat Bluetooth connection manager which should make it easy to create links between the Zire 72 and various devices.

Looks-wise, PalmOne has gone blue, with a non-slip, rubberised material used for much of the outer rim of the casing. The multimedia emphasis is pushed by the presence of shortcut buttons which launch the camera application and RealOne player. These partner a another pair of buttons which are set by default to initiate contacts and calendar in good, old fashioned, Palm PDA style.

The processor is nice and fast at 312MHz, but Palm has rather scrimped on RAM, providing just 32MB and taking some of that for internal processes, so that just 24MB is there for you to use. SD cards may well be a necessity to augment this.

Battery life is a bit of a let-down for such a multimedia focussed machine - we got three and a half hours from a utility called BatteryBench when pushing the processor at Full Power setting. Lots of MP3 playing could well reduce this somewhat.

PalmOne's consumer-focussed PDAs get better and better, and this one hangs together as a multimedia machine very nicely in terms of features, though the battery life may let it down.