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Sony Launches 2 New "Video" Clie Models
boss_ton writes "Sony is launching its newest Clie handhelds(NX80V, NX73V ), a combination personal video player and personal digital assistant, to the United States.Its already a huge hit in Japan. Amazon is reporting the launch date as July 11th. The NX80V is priced at $600.
Here's the scoop on CNet. The official product page is here."
It's interesting that they keep managing to up the price a notch with every new iteration of the device... Might we see $1000 PDA's in the near future?
grisha.org
Q: Why is Japan so much more advanced than the U.S. and other 1st world nations? A: Most other 1st world nations have to put large portions of their economies towards supporting and maintaining a military. Since WWII, Japan has not been allowed greater than a 1000 person National Guard; and is otherwise protected by the US's armed forces. This has many effects. One is more money to spend on technological R&D. Another is more money to spend on education, which leads to a smarter population capable of making huge technology leaps. Furthermore, the Japanese have other cultural factors that contribute alongside these economic factors to create an environment suited very well for developing bleeding edge technology.
I want the big screen and the virtual graffiti space. I don't want the freakin' camera. Drop the camera off one of those models and shave off $100 for crying out loud.
Same problem with all these great new cellphones... the Sony Ericsson P800 looks like a pretty awesome device with a killer interface, but darnit, I have a $1000+ digital camera, I don't need a stinkin' webcam making the phone/pda bulkier.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
A lot of us were surprised it didn't have built-in Bluetooth. Note however that the version of the NX73 Sony France released (and presumably the rest of the European versions) DOES have built-in bluetooth. France is NOT however releasing an NX80 at all, with or without BT.
Some reasoning here: in Japan, there are a ton of fast wireless data services, and they have CF cards for access (similar to a GSM/GPRS PCMCIA card for your laptop). The Japanese haven't really adopted Bluetooth; connecting your PDA/laptop to your cell phone for wireless net access just isn't necessary with all the wireless services they have there. Everyone gets the appropriate CF card and hops online that way.
Now in Europe, Bluetooth is all the rage - and pairing the PDA with the cell phone is almost a must. That's why Sony released the Bluetooth device in Europe but not Japan.
But we're all surprised (and I'm personally disappointed) there isn't a Bluetooth model in the US - adoption here hasn't been nearly as fast as in Europe, but it's becoming more popular.
There is of course a Bluetooth Memory Stick you can purchase to add support, but that's not as elegant as built-in. The high-end NZ90 model does however have built-in Bluetooth in all markets.
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
Relative cost. Gadgets are relatively cheaper, compared to housing, transportation, and cars.
You can see the same effect in NYC. Why do secretaries buy Prada? If they spent the money on housing in a normal city, they could afford a house. If they spend that money on their apt in NYC, they move up from a 350 to a 375 sq ft studio.
Geography and culture dictate dense cities in Japan, so people will tend to spend relatively more on gadgets and less on housing and cars.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
You need to try a Pocket PC. Standard graphic API for games, everything's always hi-res, a real FS and a real filebrowser, multitasking, standard screen resolution, extensible input area (just look at the number of input options).
Pocket PCs have their problems, but they overcame many of the incompatibility problems taht now plague Palm OS long ago. Palm can't seem to decide if they want to kill Grafitti or not. Sony and Palm have different screen resolutions on their devices (what a mess for trying to program a game). There's a whole legacy architecture to support, so we may not see many native applications for a long time. There's no standardized expansion format (Sony = Memory Stick, Palm = SD).
All Pocket PCs on the market for the past year have had an ARM based processor. They all have 240x320 16K color displays. They all have SD expansion (with a few exceptions). They all have 32M of flash. They all have audio input and output capabilities. They all have a 5-way directional pad and 4 front buttons.