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Sony Clie Officially For Sale (In English)
Red Mercury writes: "Sony has just announced their much anticipated high resolution (320x320) Palm OS-based PEG-N710 Clie Handheld. You can read their press release, and check out Red Mercury's experience with a pre-production unit here." And if you'd like to do more than look, lazylion says: "While everyone was busy yesterday oggling Apple's new low cost sub-notebook, Sony quietly began accepting pre-orders for the US English version of their fabulous Palm-alike, the Clie PEG-N700c. This is the one with the jog dial, MP3 player, memory stick & 320 x 320 px display. Cool! They even match. I'll take one of each!"
A typewriter made a better typewriter than a computer, and calculators were better calculators. Higher portability, and almost certainly a low cost for the devices combined than for a computer. Convergence can be good, but it's often a question of where(when?) on the timeline you are. I for one think that the current VisorPhone technology is not good enough to release a VisorPhone-style device. I wouldn't want to bring a PDA jogging, or the added bulk of an MP3 player in my breast pocket on business occasions. I want all this and more in a device that I could store in my wallet in a credit-card slot, but that's not happening yet
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'm still going to resist. If they are this good now, I can't be more than a year from having a PDA I can actually code on. Then I'll just need a teeny little keyboard that I type on with pins to go with it ;-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
For starters, it has a reflective screen so (unlike my palm)
What the hell are you talking about? The palm screen is transflective* which means that the backlight transmits through the back (sides) of the screen but daylight reflects off the back reflector just like your watch or calculator.
I don't know about you but my Palm screen looks best in bright sunlight.
* - Unless you're using a IIIc, in which case all bets are off. I'm not sure of the IIIc screen technology but hey're fugly, even with the backlight in a dark room. Reminds me of the old colour CGA screens, all "sparkly" and stuff.
I'm not sure if Unix on PDAs is relevant yet. In a couple of years, when we can fit high res, lots of memory and a fast CPU inside a small form factor, Linux as core may look more appealing (and PalmOS will need to adapt).
Currently, PDAs don't do advanced things like multimedia very well, so there are some that advocate buying specialised devices and using PDAs solely for taking notes, keeping contacts and the like.
Fine, but just like with regular computers, I don't think we'll ever think of them as completely satisfactory. At least not until they do things like understand what we say to them, project and record graphics and sound with holodeck quality around us and allow instant communications with anyone, while becoming much much less intrusive to wear.
I'm just glad that there are companies other than Palm Inc developing these things too. Their current M?? machines don't offer much that'd make me want to get rid of my IIIx, but the screen on this Clie looks like it could enhance real tasks that we use Palm sized machines for these days, like Internet access, data entry, games, simple multimedia tasks etc. With 320x320 it's even better than the quite cool PocketPCs.. but why 8-bit color only?
Their website says that it comes with OS version 3.5
What is with that? The main reason for V4.0(If I have heard correctly,) is to support removable memory in a standard way.
Does anyone know if they are going to upgrade?
James
James Ray Kenney mailto:jrkenney@swbell.net
I was waiting for somebody to bring this up... Most importantly, with AutoCf (free from HandEra) you can set things up so that applications appear to run directly from compact flash (they actually swap, but do so with the granularity of a record (512 bytes I think)) so long as the application writer followed the basic rules suggested for Palm OS developers.
Such a critter for Sony is starting to show up in beta (and handspring has flirted with the idea), but HandEra (formerly TRG) is the only one that has really delivered. Plus I would much rather have compact flash expansion then some sort of mickey mouse memory stick that offers far less for much more.
The HandEra 330 also manages to pack either 4 AAA (think NiMh rechargables or Duracell Ultras) or a lithium ion battery pack internal to the normal Palm III form factor, as well as an integrated voice recorder application (that can go to either compact flash or MMC). It has a souped up dragonball CPU as well, for one of the fastest palms around.
What is really interesting to me is that a small group of hackers from Des Moines can consistently kick the butt of huge conglemerates such as the likes of Palm and Sony in terms of real world device functionality. I thought that era of computing technology had ended... it's nice to see it can still be done.
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
better resolution is nice, but many apps depend on the origional palm screen specs, how many apps will render wrong or wierd because of this?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Is it just me who worries about that statement? Considering that there are many thousands of applications for the Palm OS (most of which should work on the newer OSs), something's strange. Sony should have a reason to write a much lower figure (you don't do that willingly unless you have a good reason). Might it have something to do with the fact that it's a hi-res display?
IIRC, more shades of gray can be used for a better display of text: anti-aliasing. Would be interesting to know why they didn't implement it (maybe they did, I don't know, never had a Palm).
Palm Desktop from Palm will work with this.
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
..at least if the past performance of Palm OS PDAs' processors is any indication, the Clie's CPU doesn't have what it takes to decode high-bitrate MP3 or Ogg audio.
And if we extrapolate from there, it seems obvious that Sony has included a dedicated MPEG audio decoder chip on the Clie. Your odds of hacking that to play Ogg audio are, as they say, slim to none.
Marko Karppinen
Now all we have to do is pray the good old chaps at MI5 and MI6 agencies create a self destructing Palm, to give their agents.
word
Want Root?
For those who think Sony's 500 dollar pricetag is a bit steep you might want to consider the HandEra 330 from http://www.handera.com/ . The 330 has a 320x240 screen, a virtual grafiti area (you can pop it up on demand), access to CF, MMC and SD cards. And the price tag is in the 350 dollar range.
perl -le '$_="6110>374086;2064208213:90<307;55";tr[0- >][ LEOR!AUBGNSTY];print'
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
Convergence will only come when the form fits the function or is so small as to be unnoticable. Most importanly for portables when storage and battery life are a magnitude better than the current state.
I find your argument somewaht weakened by using 20 years as a comparison. I was using a typewriter 10 years ago and really don't think is was affordable to switch to computers/printers until the mid 90s. They already had Ataris 20 years ago. People still use calculators al the time (I do). 5-10 years is an eternity in computing technologies. You'll have plenty of time (as a consumer) to see these coming and adjust to them. It's not something you have to get ready for.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Does anyone else find it strange that the pictures of the 700c are all doctored to look better? It's obvious that all the photos of the color Clie have been modified to show it as having the same type of vivid colors and brightness that the Visor Prism and Palm IIIc have, but that's just not accurate.
Check it for yourself:
http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/clie/
The 700c uses the same type of passive color display technology that the color gameboy uses. It's not active matrix, it's not self illuminating, it's very different from what they show on the website.
When you have an advertisement, simulated pictures are almost expected. But on the Sony website, they have a whole gallery where you can check out the 700c from each angle, and each one has the same type of manipulated photo.
This is just bad chess.
The downside, I am afraid, for Handspring (not so much Sony...if the Clie flops no big deal to them) is that they have to PAY Palm to use the OS. Linux doesn't have the problem. Every other handheld OS has this problem, but Linux (well, maybe NetBSD too but let's not get into that battle again...). While the Agenda may not be very good now (at least they delayed it so they can debug it some more), with the devlopers who already have one writing stuff, it can only get better. And, so, the Agenda folks may not have everything figured out, at least someone out their can look at their code and see what's up with it. How may of you can do this with Palm? Yeah I thought so!
I know I am preaching to the chior but I really hate people knocking on what I consider is an unfinished product. To the whiners who bought one and are bitching.....they say right on the web page to not expect to do any important work on the things just yet and I agree. It's a developer handheld that may be able to do interesting things a lot sooner then Palm ever did. Once a better version of the handheld comes out, then you can lay into them (and yourself if your a programmer on the project). Besides, as we all know, people will go through some pretty serious hoops to get something for nothing (how many of us clog our cable modems downloading 650 meg iso's??). As Microsoft proved, it's pretty hard to compete with something available for free.
I imagine that with a Agenda and a wireless ethernet card, you could, theoretically, use one as a remote for your Linux based MP3 Jukebox, you can have the wireless do all of the updating for you (cron jobs run every 5 minutes when in range, and definitely at night). The Agenda is a platform that still developing. It will be quite exciting when these things are given more power.
After looking at the pages referring to the new Sony, I think it's a good looking handheld. I don't like that goofy stick thing hanging on the headphones. Looks like it just might pull the head phones off as you are running for a bus when downtown. I am afraid the bar has been raised a bit higher for Agenda, but eventually someone will bring out a Linux based PDA that will kill the proprietary ones...it's just a matter of time.
Gorkman
I'd have to disagree with this for several reasons. First, handheld devices are quite popular with techno-geeks like sysadmins and programmers. I'm a sysadmin in a team of about 20, 12 of us have Pocket PC devices, and 3 other have Palm OS devices. I decided on Pocket PC over Palm OS because of it's color capabilities, MP3 playback, and mulitmedia functions. I think that Sony is trying to appeal to these consumers with this new Clie, not the executives. Which is exactly what Palm OS needed, something to attract the younger audience away from Pocket PC. I would have loved to buy a Palm OS handheld over a Pocket PC, but none of them offered, at the time, what I wanted. I'm getting one of these as soon as I can, and I would bet that many more existing Pocket PC people will start jumping ship as well.
And as far as executives not willing to shell out cash for PDAs, I seem to recall iPaqs selling for upwards of a grand on eBay only a few months ago.
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
As long as the Agenda is a good $50 less than a handspring, it has a market. Maybe not for consumers, but for custom PDA solutions. When I was discussing the options between Handsprings, Palms and WinCE to the administration of a hospital we were doing a palm solution for, they went with Handspring. Sure it's not as featureful as the WinCEs and doesn't have the Palm brand, but it was cheaper. A lot cheaper than the CEs and somehwat cheaper than the Palms. When you are fitting 500 people with these things, $50 adds up.
-no broken link
Yes, but will there be custom functionality in the Windows software that won't work with the standard Palm Desktop for the Mac? Perhaps multimedia capabilities?
Here's what their website lists for system requirements:
No mention of Macs at all.
Many people cited the fact that all programs and the OS itself wewre hard-wred for the 160x160 resolution. It seemed intuitively obvious to me that you could just double the resolution and use 2x2 pseudo-pixels for backwards compatability.
Now that I've seen comparative screenshots, I'm glad I stood where I stood. The difference *IS* dramatic! My hat is off to Sony and I hope others follow.
Now, if only they can do something about that price tag...
You have a point, however, 20 years ago I was using a PC for those functions - an Apple ][+ with an Epson MX-80 printer. Beyond those functions, I was able to find further use beyond the sum of the parts. And I had a technical edge over many of my peers just because of my familiarity with the converged items. Yes, I was an early adopter, but being such gave me advantages I enjoy today. That's why I referred to forward thinking in my initial response.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Well, I like Linux as much as most people here. But I can see this only dimming the Agenda's chances for survival. Sure its another hand held computing device in a rapidly flooding market.. right-o.
But even Sony was smart enough to license PalmOS from Palm. Palm obviously has something very good. Writing Palm Apps is easy. They have the software, they have the fanbase. Best to tap into that no? Add your new whiz bang features, pay palm your royalties, get a lil piece of the market. Palm is still king. Prolly will be for a good while.
Agenda is a good idea, but I just think that for once Unix, even if you strip out all the shit and use cramfs and just shove and shove and shove strip this, use a compact standard C library etc, is just not going to be competitive here. They would need to release a really awesome SDK for this thing to compete with Palm. They need some really killer apps and more than just 18 MB of ram (16 of that being flash) to compete. FLTK is sweet and very nice GUI kit especially if you like C++, but it just cant compete. I find PalmApps just as easy to write as FLTK if not a little easier.
Anyhow this really isnt off topic since Its real relevant to how the market is going and the fact that Sony is playing Palm's game shows a lot.
Jeremy
From the Sony website, they explicitly say that the Clie will *play* both MP3 and ATRAC, but the Memory Stick will only support ATRAC. However, later they say that the Memory Stick will allow users to pile on more games, applications, and data. This makes me wonder if OGG files (which ar technically just data) could be played on a Clie? could a OGG payer app be written which takes advantage of the player hardware (including the headphone-based remote) ? What are teh hacking opportunities here?
it would be irony indeed if we could play OGGs on a Sony product :)
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Does anybody have any information on wireless networking (Bluetooth, 802.11b, etc.) options for this device? All the options I know of are for Visors only, but this would be a pretty sweet little puppy to use as a mobile terminal...
I was just checking out Red Merc's review and took a look at some of the screenshots they have. About the most impressive thing about this is its wonderful screen and video capability.
:P
For starters, it has a reflective screen so (unlike my palm) when I take it outside I can actually use it instead of seeing a nice black rectangle.
The review points out how the video play is--quite nice... also the screen refresh rate, etc... because this writes directly to the video memory in order to erase the screen, you will see a MUCH better frame rate than its palm counterpart.
Now if I had only seen this just a tad sooner I wouldnt have to think about taking back a palm..
Hmmm. And if I want to carry fewer little, easily lost or damaged devices, I'd buy the new Sony. The stick memory looks like the single best reason to get this device, imho. I can't wait to see a movie player for this device, and an appropriately compressed copy of a film from DVD. The possibility to have a feature film on a device like this is something I would spend the money on, just because it's there. And imagine the possibilities for staying awake during dull meetings!
On that note, the very first person to ever demonstrate the mp3 format for me was an executive-- not some 20something dotcom hipster, a parent of teenagers with a corner office in a skyscraper.
I do not have a signature
Does anyone have experience using actual, unfucked-up MP3s on this thing? I for one won't touch a Sony unless/until I am convinced that it won't eat my collection.
sulli
RTFJ.
The pictures also point something else out -- just how less reflective to outside sources the screen of the Sony is vs. the screen of the Prism. That's something I noticed right away when I bought the Prism. No glare.
Okay, it's hard to see in sunlight. But that just points out that the Sony will be more difficult to read in darkness. Someone said it uses the same type screen as the Gameboy Color. My son has one of those and I *much* prefer my Prism's screen to the Gameboy screen. In 95% of the places I've seen both, the Prism's screen is *much* easier to read than the Gameboy's.
Maybe Sony has corrected that -- I haven't actually seen the unit yet. But unless they did, I'll stick to the Prism, or maybe buy the Palm 505 when I get a chance to look at it.
Sean.
Sony, as well as many other vendors (including Handspring, which is composed of disgruntled Palm Computing hardware engineers)have in recent months, proven that Palm Computing's business model will in fact work.
IN a press release around the time of their spinn off prom 3Com, Palm said 'We want to become the Mocrosoft oh handheld devices'. Now that may have a vary different meaninf for this audience, than what they intended, however, they seem to be well on their way to achieving their goal of being THE OS vendor for handheld devices. There was some debate when they made this announcement as to weather they could viably continue to build and support the palm line of handheld hardware devices as well as license their OS to 3rd party vendors. So far, the popularity of their os is not in question. Weather they can derive enough revenue from licensing the OS alone, is.
The introduction of this new high quality Sony device, as well as the offerings from other hardware vendors are now driving an increased rate of adoption of the OS. Palm is well on it's way to a successful and profitable future.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
They have a huge stake in preventing DVDs from being copied, and the current music monopoly suites them just fine. Every single non-cd audio device they have come out with incorperates some kind of copy-prevention.
It's quite surprising how short the memory of this group can be.
maskirovka
Red Mercury writes: "Sony has just announced their much anticipated high resolution (320x320) Palm OS-based PEG-N710 Clie Handheld. You can read their press release, and check out Red Mercury's experience with a pre-production unit here."
A total of three links to his site in the first three lines. Not bad for a shameless self-promotion :-)
- Battery life sucks if you use it a lot
- If I wanted to do real work on the road, I'd use a laptop. For what a PocketPC costs, the added power you get with a laptop is worth the extra expense.
- Color was really unnecessary, except for games
True, some features, like MP3 capability are nice so you don't have to take multiple devices with you, even color is OK, though unnecessary if you strictly want a portable rolodex, but I don't want to see the Palm platform evolve towards the PocketPC platform.If I want a Palm, I'll buy a Palm, if I want an Mp3 player, I'll buy an Mp3 Player.
Also, the markets for the two don't really converge. Most PDAs are used by executives, who for the most part have no intrest in Mp3s, and thus aren't willing to pay the extrea $$$.
TODO: Something witty here...