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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!"
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
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?
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.
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.
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...
-- @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
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
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