New Sony Clie: PalmOS Is Back in Style

mattr was among several people to send in obscure and confusing links to japanese sites featuring pictures and foreign words about the latest Clie- Sony's PalmOS based handheld. However mattr wrote a good summary of what its all about, and you can read about it by just hitting that link below. Jogdial, Memory stick, capacity to store 2 hours of video, color etc etc. I've kinda considered WinCE handhelds to be way ahead in the game, but it looks like the score may be evening up.

"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."

Comments

Re:Multitasking

[jandrese]

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.

No, not really.

[2nd Post!]

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!

Re:Clie's Not As Coolio As Sony Says

[cdipierr]

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).

An English version of this web page

[plover]

or at least a shockwave version that speaks English can be found here.

John

Re:Personally, I like WinCE

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> 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.

Re:a change in Zawinski's Law ?

[susano_otter]

I don't think Zawinsky's Law is obsolete yet - remember, email is the gateway drug of the Internet.

Clearly, mp3s will evolve until they can send email. This is in accordance with Zawinsky's Law.

Sony screws themselves with ATRAC (8-track?)

[isaac]

I posted this on PDA Buzz a few days ago. Yes, it's pretty. Yes, the hires screen is promising. But that ATRAC crap won't fly outside of Japan. It requires some extraordinarily nasty windoze software, along with special "MagicGate" SDMI MemorySticks(TM) that are even more expensive than regular MemorySticks(TM) (which are already expensive and proprietary).

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

Hmmm

[Bob Abooey]

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,

multimedia, etc.?

[slovo]

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?

Clie's Not As Coolio As Sony Says

[Ardvaark]

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...

Memory stick

[cworley]

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.

Battery life?

[Dionysus]

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).

Re:audio

[Fat Rat Bastard]

ATRAC has been used in all MiniDisc units (I belive that was why it was created) and has moved to the Music Clip and MemoryStick walkman. I know Sony's been working on it for about 10 years now, and its a pretty damn good compression scheme.

As for conversion software chances are they'll throw the software in for free. They already do with the music clip / memorystick walkman and some MiniDisc units that you can attach to a computer.