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Sony Announces Excellent New Handhelds
PalmAddict writes "Sony Japan has announced what was only supposed to be a non-working mockup at Palm Source just a few short weeks ago, as reality. Palminfocenter has the scoop on the PEG-NR70, a thin, folding, half VGA, built-in digital camera picture taking, MP3 playing powerhouse." Nothing I can say except wow.
It seems that Sony has a hard time focusing on consumer products in the IT sphere. They tend to hit or miss. The VAIO line was a pretty tepid offering up until the previous iteration. The Playstation I & II were tremendously successful in their markets. The CLIEs were good(great?). Their MP3 players and MD players had terrible connectivity to PCs or Macs.
The new PDA looks good though. Maybe this will be a hit.
Stuff a cell phone into this thing, and I'd think it was perfect.
Is it just me, or do you guys think that this thing would have been 500% better if they had turned the keyboard sideways... so that it could have been made large enough for human hands?
-Evil
They also seem to move away from the standard 'square' resolutions (160x160 or 320x320) of previous PalmOS devices. According to Sony's homepage these two new models run at 320x480.
--Ives
"Nothing I can say except wow."
(disregarding the screen for a moment)
All of these things have been done before by... guess who... Pocket PC. MP3, Digital Camera, high-resolution screen, etc. These are all standard features on Pocket PCs.
Still, Sony is taking the right direction by adding these fatures to their devices. Some people don't like to play MP3s or Videos, I find that it's a great way to pass the time on the long train ride to work every morning (I could drive but the traffic is really bad in my suburb).
my network is 100Baset T wired in the basement and 1st floor, I am 802.11b to the 2nd floor and whatever other 802.11b device I want to use (Company assigned laptop, hacked Compaq IA-1 on second floor, tuxbot robot I am building in basement). This $465.0 does not support 802.11
yet? Gee If I was going to use it to access my servers or the internet I'd want 802.11b capability.
nokia are doing this with the symbian OS and thats shipping soon
http://www.nokia.com/phones/7650/
regards
john jones
Think of the trolls!! How will those poor wretched creatures who value their self-worth on the number of first-posts achieved ever survive if they have to shell out money in order to even have a chance at a first-post?
Then again, that may not be a bad idea. Now that I think about it, I think that's a great idea, even for the people who don't subscribe. The first n posts would all come from people who care enough to subscribe and who probably don't want to waste ad-free page views on content-free posts. This would likely result in a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the first comments. Sometime that's all I get to read anyway, so 30-minute-delayed stories in exchange for better comments is a trade-off I'd be willing to make
I like the whole thing except for the camera. (That seems completely useless.) The MP3 is convenient and pleasant (I like memory sticks.) The flexibility of shape arrangements seems like a good idea. If I ever need to replace my Palm V this would be a serious contender.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
There are a lot of posts saying "but all of this stuff has been done before by other PDAs..."
While this is true, the 320x480 resolution with a full-tablet mode has only been done by one PDA, the Apple Newton 2000/2100, now discontinued for five years.
A screen resolution of 320x480 makes a HUGE difference when working with information, text, graphics, etc. With a resolution of 320x480 and a virtual graffiti area (which could conceivably be left hidden and replaced with a 3rd-party natural handwriting recognition system?!) we could FINALLY have a near-Newton-killer on our hands...
Of course, it is still lacking in some areas... Only a 66MHz Dragonball CPU vs. the 162MHz StrongARM in the Newton 2x00, PalmOS vs. NewtonOS (which is still a decade ahead of its time), no PCMCIA slot(s), no 3rd party natural handwriting recognizers yet available for PalmOS, etc.
Still, wow. For a long time, I've thought that since nobody would ever make another PDA with a 320x480 display, nobody would ever even begin to come close to Newton. But this does! In fact, get me that natural handwriting recognizer and a nice "natural" database like Notion for Newton and you could see me switch... Maybe... Well, okay, probably not.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'll admit, Sony (and the Nokia Phone that someone else linked to) are on the right path to my "dream device". I would like a gadget that combines my cell phone, my digital camera, and my digital music player. PDA functionality doesn't interest me too much.
The challenge is to do everything as well as the individual devices. Sony's and Nokia's attempts aren't there yet. For example, the resolution of the photos that these devices can take is pathetic compared to "real" digital cameras.
It will take a lot of work and experimentation before integrating devices in this fashion will work well. It will be hard to figure out the user interface, and to pack all those digital components into a small container. I am convinced it will happen eventually, but for now, I'm willing to pack around my three toys everywhere I go.
Evan Jones http://evanjones.ca/
I'm looking at buying a Clie T415. How bad's the display, really? Most monochrome displays are horrible by anyone's standards, so, relative to my Palm III, how is it? I've heard lots of bad reviews, and a couple of good ones, but I really don't trust hardware review sites that can spend 10+ pages "reviewing" the life, the universe, and lo! the actual hardware around half-way through the article.
Michael C. Hollinger