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New Sony Clie: PalmOS Is Back in Style
"According to the sonypdadev email sent out just before midnight in Tokyo, Sony will start selling a new model of their PalmOS-eqipped Clie, the 160 gram PEG-N700C on April 7. Not only is it chock full of hot tech, the handheld also could redefine the mobility of music. The page and Japanese PDF explains how this promiscuous unit offers music downloading side-by-side with copyright managed content on removable sticks and CD track ripping through your laptop.. and it connects to a software VCR they've had for a while called GigaPocket, which could finally put the Vaio's memory stick port to some good use!
The new Clie features a 33MHz DragonballVZ cpu, PalmOS 3.5, USB cradle, infrared, TFT, and special features aimed at networked media.. it can play back full consumer range (20Hz-20KHz) audio, takes normal and copyright protected memory sticks, has ATRAC-3 compatibility, 132Kbps audio recording, sports a new extra high resolution 320x320 dot display and font, and comes with stereo headphones, and shuttle remote, 11 hour stamina battery, and a digital phone connector for Internet connectivity.
OpenMG Jukebox 2.0 for CLIE lets you "Record your CD on a MagicGate Memory Stick.. and play it on your Clie" (with jogdial support). The largest stick (128MB, on sale the same day) supposedly can hold up to 240 minutes of audio.. or up to 160 minutes of MPEG, AVI, Quicktime 3/4 video. I thought the Zaurus was sweet (and it is) but this has got to be the ultimate A/V package for now.
Incidentally, some other Sony products that use the memory stick are a new mobile phone (Java version coming soon), the Cyber-shot digital camera, and the network walkman. You can buy 2 songs online with an 800 yen Network Music Pass web money card."
Doesn't this device somewhat defeat the purpose of PalmOS, which was simplicity, and just enough functionality to do scheduling and other PIM-type tasks?
Yes and no; mostly no.
The pilot, III, &c, came with a small amount of memory, and therefore limited functionality. I've got a Vx, and while I still use it for more or less the same stuff, it's handy having a camera, extra IR, etc.
If this new machine can have up to 16Mb without affecting performance of all the simple apps that traditionalists know and love, so much the better. In fact, it would be a waste not to. If you want a simple PDA, buy an Palm III.
Of course, if we see emacs coming out for the clie, then it is time to worry.
Why do you want multitasking on a device with a 320x320 screen and a 33mhz processor? It's not like you are going to be able to run stuff in the background without seriously impacting the foreground apps anyway. Besides, the palm is really only barely fast enough for handwriting recognition as it is; I usually overclock mine, which improves its accuracy about 50% when I write fast. Plus it's not like you do a lot of stuff on the Palm that really NEEDs to be run in the background. How many times have you encoded MP3s or running web servers on your Palm? Finally, everything is already in memory on the Palm, so switching between apps is already fast.
If you only wanted multitasking so you could pull up a calculator while writing a note or something, you might want to look into Palm "desk accessories" which are basically identical to the "desk accessories" on Finder 7.
I think the Palm's biggest strength is it's simplicity.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Maybe it's because, um, it's crappy, proprietary, and copy-controlled? And if so, won't the same thing happen to Clie?!
sulli
RTFJ.
I don't know about you, but I have a devil of a time fitting my laptop in my jacket pocket.. Good thing I've got an iPaq with StowAway keyboard -- I barely know i've got it on me until I want to work on that large word document and listen to some music.. The fact is that the CE devices are completely different - The palm makes a better address book, the batteries last forever and a used Pilot is cheap enough that if you lose it or break it, its no big deal - but I'm digging this feature overload right now, I've been interested in writting for fun for a while now, and I finally can pull out a full size keyboard and work with a powerful word processor at a cafe anywhere. I dig it, YMMV.
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
ATRAC is the compression used for MD (MiniDisc). You can read more here at www.minidisc.org.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
It may well defeat the intent and purpose of the PalmVx, Visor Platinum, etc, or the newer M105, but not the purpose of Palm per se.
The PalmOS today is supposed to be more powerful and flexible to keep up with advancing technology just like the new Sony. If this were unleased 2 years ago, it would have been stupid, but in today's tech, it would seem to make sense.
What I wonder is why the thing doesn't have a built in 320x320 camera!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Being a PalmOS developer, I'll address some of this.
Sony chose to make the events that the jog dial triggers be completely proprietary instead of mapping them to something like the pageup/down arrows. Therefore, if you want to support them, you have to listen for those events specifically. It's not hard, but it requires you go to Sony's poorly designed developer support site, and wait 5-7 days to get a header file with the events in them, then go back and implement support in every phase of your app. I've done it, and it's cool, but really since the Clie market penetration is small, most people probably won't bother.
As to the memory stick. Yeah, this is pretty worthless right now, but Palm made a promise that the expansion manager technology they're using in OS/4.0 will support the Clie's memory stick as well as Palm's new SD/MMC standard. Therefore, support for memory sticks might get better, assuming you can flash the Sony devices with OS/4.0 when it comes out (which I doubt since it looks like OS/4.0 won't fit in 2mb).
newton. any model. 130 or 2x00 series is best. emate if you can find one (built-in keyboard)
otherwise, get a keyboard, plug and play. built-in newtonWorks text editor/word processor. sync/backup to PC, Mac, Linux..
real handwriting recognition, bigger screen, voice notes, PCMCIA, speaker.
cheap on ebay.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
John
John
I would have to disagree strongly. For starters, to use the Jog Dial effectively all one needs is a third party application such as PowerJog. This gives me the ability to do everything from the Jog Dial, from going through menus to clicking on buttons, while adding scrolling functionality to essentially all apps. The only things I still need to my stylus for is Graffiti and AvantGo links.
:) than the Palm Vx, which always felt a little too wide for my taste. The side effect of this is that the screen is much sharper, but not so ridiculous as the m100 which makes everything on it look like spider trails.
:)
The memory stick is a godsend for people who use their handhelds to read books (I suggest Smoothy, which uses the Jog Dial to change auto-scrolling speed). I have the entire Lord of the Rings on my CLIE and don't have to pay with reduced space for my apps. Also, there are a handful of programs that are kind of large for keeping in memory but that I still want to pull out every once in a while. For example, I keep LispMe on the Memory Stick so that if I write a Scheme program in MemoPad I can move LispMe on to it just long enough to run it, not taking up any permanent space. I can think of dozens of other uses for the memory stick off the top of my head that do not involve backup, and that's without even waiting for developers to really start working it into their applications.
So the Jog Dial and the MemoryStick remain useful beyond anything the Palm Vx offers. Then we get into opinions:
I like the fact that the CLIE is narrower. It feels nicer in my hand; more like a small notepad (the paper type, people. Remember those? Very high resolution, blue lines accross a white screen-like surface?
As far as accessories go, it is true that the CLIE is currently barren. But so was the Visor when it first came out. Sony is developing tech that allows a MemoryStick to essentially double as a Springboard Module. This in itself is enough to counter arguments about the CLIE not having accessories. And BTW, I personally like the case.
Finally, as to video and sound and such, I would like to point out that there are thousands of programs written for the PalmOS that are downloaded every day that the vast majority of people would look at and say "WTF? Who on earth would want to do that?" Fact of the matter is, the strength of PalmOS is that you can make it do anything without sacrificing the ease of use of the basic functions. If you want to play movies or sound and have the space on your handheld, you can, and without really bloating the interface.
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Don't wrestle with pigs; you'll both get muddy, but the pig likes it.
I dunno, I think there must be some market if Windows CE machines are selling, right? The Clie seems to fit that niche, with a 320x320 screen, multimedia capabilities, etc.
It's an entertainment device, like a minidisc player. ATRAC support.
It's a PDA, like a palm pilot!
It's got a high resolution screen and a faster CPU, so it can play Gameboy games!
You can finally do maps decently on it, with double the resolution and high color.
Is it doing too many things at once? I dunno. But it's pretty feature complete against Windows CE machines, and really doesn't compete against other Palm devices yet.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Yes it has a memory stick so you can play ATRAC music, but so what? I bet you could buy a Palm Pilot or Handspring and a dedicated MP3 player for the money you'd save. And your music playing wouldn't be hampered by Sony doing it's damndest to lock you into their hobbled music technology.
Exactly.
Could be cool, but it's not. Then they lie with numbers.
"up to 160 minutes of MPEG, AVI, Quicktime 3/4 video"!!!!
Yeah, what ever. As you pointed out, that's a bitrate of 12K/s, which by my in-the-head calculations equals 80x40 video at 30fps MPEG1.
Yippie.
Call me again when Sony has implemented MPEG4 and 1G storage.
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That's not what I meant.
Who needed a pixel based display anyway? Why I just about cried tears of joy when my electronic organizer displayed somewhat readable characters on a segmented LCD display.
I still remember when my pappy gave me that 'ol organizer which displayed a full telephone number in the display without scrolling - even with the dashes!!
It even had a BUILT-IN keyboard. Something you need to buy separately for these new fangled devices.
Oh, and the wonderful music it played. Type on the keyboard (TICK), save an entry (BEEP), alarm or appointment reminder (BEEP - BEEP).
It was great for games, too. I could use it to look up my friend Joe's number and call him over for a game of checkers.....
> 1. It was color.
Of course, Palm has a color model now. If you don't care about battery life, I guess.
> 2. It had just as much software as my palm device did.
Fair enough. Of course, MS always claimed that it had *more*...
> 3. I remember reading about a palmOS emulator for WinCE devices.
That won't help you keep your batteries alive or help you with your WinCE OS crashing.
> 4. CE devices get all the cool gizmos. My Vx has IR and a serial port. My friend's CE device has IR, serial, and a compact flash card compartment
HandSpring sells models with Springboards. That's not really a function of the OS, though. The OS is how you interact with it.
> filled with a 90MB IBM microdrive
Good lord, what are you doing with that thing? I still have a Palm III with 2MB. I push that (with e-books), but don't know what I'd do with much more memory.
I use my PDA as a "Personal Digital Assitant", not a handheld desktop computer. I keep notes, shopping lists, schedules, addressbooks, and e-books/web scrapings. It fits in my shirt pocket and I can get to any info very quickly. Batteries last a month.
I like gee-whiz stuff, but not if it detracts from battery life or ease of use.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The Handspring Visor can fairly trivially support CF (dunno about CF+)
There are sites that sell or document how to construct a Handspring module that is essentially a passive CF to PCMCIA adaptor with 2 or 3 wires changed to allow a Visor to see a CF card.
And there aren't any 90mb IBM microdrives. They come in 340mb, 5xxsomething and 1gb sizes.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
PalmStation has a nice summary of this new Clie. And, of course, the big news is the higher resolution (about time!). But it will be only offered in Japan, so this is largely non-news for the rest of the world.
Myself, I'm going to wait for the Palm m505 (aka the "Palm Vc"), which is due out next week.
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Music Clip / ATRAC is famously user hostile. I for one won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. MP3 or nothing for me.
sulli
RTFJ.
Their software also attempts to delete the source mp3 once conversion is complete.
This is really appalling. This fact should be included in all articles talking about Music Clip / ATRAC / Sony Palm discussions. I for one consider this denial of service and theft of my documents. Class action lawsuit anyone?
sulli
RTFJ.
I just noticed this story over at CNN: NCR (yup, old National Cash Register) is suing Palm for patent violations. Seems that NCR claims patents on a "Portable personal terminal for use in a system for handling transactions," and on a "System for handling transactions including a portable personal terminal." Those sound like broad concepts to me; I wonder if WinCE handhelds have licensed these patents from NCR?
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
Don't get me wrong, I've had my PalmPilot (original + the PalmIII expansion card) for 4 years, and wouldn't replace it with Windows for nothing, but I first put my hands on a WinCE device (a Cassiopeia) last week and I think its input method is MUCH better.
That graffity area is part of the screen, and when you want to input text, you click on a button and the graffiti (Jot, really) area appears, just like the Palm's on-screen keyboard. Hasn't any PalmOS device manufacturer thought about incorporating this ingenious idea???
That would be THE real "must-have" feature for a PalmOS device.
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Unstead of "every program attempts to expand until it can read email" should be changed to "every piece of hardware and software expands until it can play mp3s"
First issue - the 33mHz VZ *is* fast, about as fast as a 66 mHz SuperH-3, but even that is nowhere near fast enough to decode that they're saying -- this means there must be another ASIC in the mix for decoding the audio. This is a blessing and a curse -- you'd get decoded audio with no system load, but it would suck you batteries dry in only a couple of hours.
Another potential trouble spot -- many, very many, PalmOS apps are (thanks to bad design) dependant on the fact that PalmOS device screen is 160x160, and it it's bigger than that, some things can freak out; we saw this is the 'Newton' world, when the screen resolution changed from 200x336 to 200x320 -- many of your favourite Apps for their butts cut off, and some wouldn't run at all.
And, my finaly gripe is ablout the Graffiti area -- Why, when there is all this screen space and processor power, is the HWR area still *screen printed* on the glass? We can't they make it software?
I don't want to beat up on the (damn good looking) Clie, and I'm not saying this is a bad unit by any means, but I would ask that these specs be taken with a bit of realism. Remember, the first 'Griffin' class WinCE devices made similar claims, and few could deliver them all.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Actually,
On the palm, whenever you start a new program, the OS sends a stop signal to the running program. The running program then is supposed to store any data it has out and close so the new app can run. Everything is in RAM but the RAM is split into storage and executable space. Only one program gets executable space at a time.
There is multitasking of a sort on the palm. You just have to do it at app level and you don't get any cycles for your background apps. Hmm... Not really multitasking at all.
Dan
You CAN run programs directly off the memory stick. You just need to download the MSAutorun utility from the Sony Clie website. It was released on Oct 4 (not long after the Clie came out).
My fiancee is a resident physician and she uses her Clie constantly. For someone that wants a small handheld that can store up to 64 MB of medical textbooks on a single memory stick, the Clie is a godsend. Even better now that the 128 MB sticks are coming out.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Sony was correct in making the jog dial events "proprietary" (i.e. vendor-specific), since anyone writing a Clie-aware app might want to treat the jog dial differently from the up/dn arrows. Where Sony missed the boat was by not making the event handlers built into PalmOS smarter. Similar to Windows or MacOS event handlers, any code that knows what to do with an event flags the event as having been handled. This allows the built-in event handler to provide default actions for unhandled events. Sony should have made the built-in event handler resubmit unhandled jog-dial events and up/dn arrows.
As for the memory stick, I agree that things will be getting much better with the release of PalmOS 4. The support for external file systems is going to look a lot like TRG's existing CF extensions, so it should be trivial for developers to port apps already written for the TRGpro.
--
Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: Screw you, Dave!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I finally have the money to spend to get a PalmOS based PDA and there is no clear decision. Bah!
I don't think this argument holds water when there's a dozen portable MP3-CD players on the market from major manufacturers (like Philips, Casio, Sonicblue/Rio, Teac, etc.) in addition to lots of cheapo chinese oems. None cost more than $200. The RioVolt is about $160, has an MD-style remote and displays ID3 info on a dot-matrix LCD.
All these players support CDRW, allowing for well over 10 hours of 128kbit MP3 on a single rewritable disk. Granted, there's no stereo component recorder for such disks, yet, but then manipulating/storing MP3s is still much easier on a computer with a real keyboard and display.
The newest generation of these players don't even run the CD continuously, but buffer several minutes into RAM and then spin down.
Media cost is less than Minidisk (I bought 100 cdrs for $19 the other day, at a retail CompUSA), and I can use whatever bitrate I prefer, rather than fixed 132kbit ATRAC. I can play the disks I burn in my MP3-supporting DVD player in addition to my portable. There are mini-component and car stereos from Aiwa, Philips, and others that support MP3-CD as well.
Minidisk's looking much less attractive now. I do like the small disks and the hard shell, though.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
It would be easy to make a hackmaster hack that would do this
-no broken link
No MP3 support here, no-how. As if regular joes (or even fickle early-adopters) are going to start using sony's ATRAC, when they can't play them in anything but sony players (no, you can't digitally copy ATRAC files to/from minidisc) and must suffer Sony's onerous SDMI requirements (like mandatory check-in of files after x listens, etc.)
This looks nice, but reinforces my belief that the worst thing Sony did to themselves was to get into the music business. Trade MemoryStick(TM) and ATRAC for the open, industry standard CompactFlash and MP3, and they'd have a huge winner. But this thing doesn't look like a particularly good multimedia device - more like a color CLIE with a MusicClip grafted on. Two mediocre devices that go poorly together.
I won't be using a PDA as an MP3 player until it's forgettably seamless, has ample removable solid-state storage (several hours of 192kbit MP3 at least), supports the full range of bitrates to 320kbit, and battery life long enough to spend a week out of the cradle playing a few hours of tunes a day in addition to PDA functions. This thing falls down on all counts - hell, it doesn't even play the MP3's I already have (and I'm not going to convert already lossy mp3's into another lossy format, degrading them further). MagicGate Memorysticks are scarce and expensive, and bitrate is limited to 132kbit in any case.
And it's a chunkster, the thickest PalmOS device yet. And I wonder what kind of battery life they're getting... I wouldn't want to inadvertently drain my batteries dry listening to tunes and find myself needing to look up a contact or be reminded of an appointment later.
I think I'll keep my 2 meg Palm V for PDA use and my MP3-CD player for MP3 use for another few years.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Oh yeah, and probably with source code so those of us who use alternative operating systems can compile it for ourselves... (not!)
At #35 you should have at least read the story :P
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Without the full specs on the clie, it sounds like there will be additional software to purchase from Sony if you want to move your mp3s to ATRAC3 format.
(I wait impatiently for the english version)
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
I've always thought that maybe "the score may be early morning up" or at best "the score may be mid afternoon up" but never, never have I thought "the score may be evening up"
Yours,
All the best,
--Bob
Doesn't this device somewhat defeat the purpose of PalmOS, which was simplicity, and just enough functionality to do scheduling and other PIM-type tasks?
I thought the Zaurus was sweet (and it is) but this has got to be the ultimate A/V package for now
Please compare versus: Compaq iPaq H3635 (64MB coming soon) & the Casio's E125 This Sony device comes close - but IMNSHO dosnt measure up.
Ive said this a thousand times: What we need in the PDA 'industry' is an uncoupling of OS & Hardware. People have a hard time arguing that the Casio/HP/Compaq devices aren't better hardware; its simply that people don't want to buy into a(nother) M$ product. I had a hard time deciding to buy my E100 (I got it shortly after release) because M$ was 'inside'... what I want to be able to do is get it out!
The PDA industry needs to form a 'standards' body of some kind. Once this occurs I would hope to see 3Com, PocketLinux(Transvirtual), M$, Qt, Yopy, Agenda, RIP, SHARP and others write their OSs to that standard! Let the Hardware people compete on hardware (and drive features up/prices down) and let the Software Compete on Software (and drive the features up/price down). What we have here is a mess of compromise when choosing PDAs. I would have loved my Casio to come with a LinuxPDA distro of some kind, or maybe PalmOS - but the E100 had their features beat hands down.
Can someone direct me to an effort, mailing list, website of some group/person who also sees this major flaw in the direction of the PDA world? What we need is a de-coupling, witness the result of the PC world when IBM opened the PC, contrast this with the direction that Apple took. Not to slight the Apple camp, but the diversity, power, price, ubiquity, 'openness' of the PC and its model would be a good idea for the PDA world.
The original ATRAC is a minidisc compression scheme. It's quite refined, provides the 5:1 compression. A newer one, ATRAC3 is avialable on the latest minidisk recorders/player models and this is the one used by Clio. It provides the compression roughly 10:1, a quality is substantially lower than ATRAC. But my major complain is all those security features built in. Even if this is your own recording, from your own CD, Sony does really bizarre things like allowing to playback only 8 times (or so), then you have to sign in again. A memory stick is proprietory and too expensive. Finally MP3 to ATRAC3 conversion is not a good idea, it will substantially degrade the quality. These are the reasons I'm going to stay away from this box even from the technical perspective it looks quite amazing.
> 3. I remember reading about a palmOS emulator for WinCE devices.
That won't help you keep your batteries alive or help you with your WinCE OS crashing.
Hmm.. Although I could hardly say my iPaq *never* crashes, I had far more paperclip moments with my palm.. -Not to mention the iPaq is a way faster reboot from soft reset than the palm. When my palm bit the dust I bought a IIIc, for the G-wiz factor - On the second day I had it, it froze up solid, and worst of all, a soft reset deleted all records in memory - not to mention that 256 colours is hardly stunning, and you cant actually *read* the screen outdoors or in any bright ambient light.
These are basically two completely different types of devices: The palm is an excellent address book/ PIM, but the CE devices are basically 'pocket computers' - 2 megs of addresses and appointments is plenty, but I really love listening to hundreds of megs of MP3's while I type in pocket word at 320x240, -To each their own.
BTW - I've not found the battery life to be an issue, I've used my iPaq all day long and never had it hit low battery, I sync daily and this tops the battery up - For trips there are battery extenders that take AA batterys, and my favorite - The PocketPal folding solar panel - battery life till the cows come home (or the sun goes behind a cloud)
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
The screen is the size of less than half of a paperback. No way anyone would watch a 2 hour movie on that.
Then there is the battery life with it running streaming video and audio.
Any sort of multimedia is nice on these things but have very little pratical, real-world use.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
When my trusty Palm III (original!) died several months ago, I was forced to replace it. Since the Palm V was the same thing that'd been released a year before, I gave the Clie a try.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad device. But the Jog Dial, while a great idea, is poorly implemented and supported by almost nothing. (An exception is Vindigo...that shocked the hell outta me!) The memory stick suffers from the same problem: It's neato, but worthless. You cannot do anything with it except copy data back and forth between it and RAM. This essentially makes it into a harder to use backup device that is pre-obsoleted by Hotsync.
Now, none of this really hurts the Clie, and it costs the same as a Palm Vx without the added neat-o devices, but the big killer has been accessories. The Clie doesn't have the support of 3rd parth accessory makers like Palm (or even Handspring) has. The case that comes with the Clie is retarded, but I can't replace it because a replacement doesn't exist!
The new Clie doesn't seem to offer anything really new and must-have. I mean, who really wants to watch a 2-minute movie clip on their PDA? Not many...
For those of us who don't read Japanese, is there a price (hopefully USD) mentioned somewhere in the page?
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I wish Sony wouldn't do proprietary memory sticks.
I thougth they'd tried that (years ago) before and found nobody would buy. I know I've been burnt by proprietary memory (10x the cost of regular memory), and have no desire to buy any product that doesn't use a standard memory chip.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
I'm pretty sure sony are going to announce a docking station they will call Torris.
I've had a PalmVx for over a year now, and I use it on a very regular basis. I've also borrowed a friend's WinCE device, and noticed that the CE device was much more appealing to me.
1. It was color.
2. It had just as much software as my palm device did.
3. I remember reading about a palmOS emulator for WinCE devices. Not sure if it's true, but judging by the PalmOS SDK, it'll be easier to emulate palmOS on a CE device than vice versa.
4. CE devices get all the cool gizmos. My Vx has IR and a serial port. My friend's CE device has IR, serial, and a compact flash card compartment (which he filled with a 90MB IBM microdrive). Needless to say, his handheld was more fun to use and could hole a HELL of a lot more stuff.
When did the PalmOS go out of style? Since when is WinCE the leader in handhelds?
In terms of popularity, Palm sells more than anybody. In fact, Palm and Handspring together had 87 percent of the market in June 2000.
Technically, the PalmOS is limited, but definitely good enough. They're the ones that finally got the interface "right". They've got the right form factor, ease-of-use, battery life and necessary speed. They don't have a huge list of bells, whistles and gongs, but the essentials are there - and physically stripped down to exactly the size I want. It is exactly what you need as a PDA. More features (cameras, GPS, colour, music, phone, wireless are available as add-ons) are nice, but they aren't always essential, and shouldn't come at a permanent increase in size.
WinCE is attempting to be an all-singing, all-dancing embedded OS. The reality is that it's being handily beaten by Palm in the handheld market, by WindRiver (and other embedded OSes) in the realtime and embedded markets.
Handspring is finally producing the phone that I've wanted ever since I tried to juggle my old Casio BOSS and a cellular brick-phone. Now if only it was available in Canada. (Oh, and by the way Nokia, I don't want to enter appointments into a phone, using a clumsy keypad and itty-bitty screen).
There are still way more apps for PalmOS than any of its competitors, and developers get the benefits of an open environment. WinCE is a real late-comer and doesn't offer enough improvements to be the front-runner.
The non-disclaimer: I own a Palm Vx, chosen specifically because of it's form factor, user-interface and applications. I write embedded telecommunications software (on realtime OSes) for a living. That's my basis for these opinions.
I wouldn't want someone to glue my Rolodex to my Stereo.. why would you want Sony to glue a Memory Stick player to a PDA?
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- Size
- Battery life
The Sony puts up a good fight, but 11 hours is peanuts for people outsourcing major parts of their brain (like me).Censorship on Slashdot
What is the battery life on this one?
One of the reason I went for the Visor Deluxe instead of the color one was because of with the Deluxe model (b/w), two AAA batteries last almost 3 weeks, while the guy at the counter only thought one charge of the color version would last 6-8 hours (or something like that).
Je ne parle pas francais.