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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."
I went there in January and of course went to akihabara (electric town). In Japan they limit the time that a retailer can sell products. Due to this they can only sell the newest products. They also do not like to buy used products as much as people in the US.
Us Clie-heads are less than impressed with this device. It's merely a generational refinement of the existing NX70 series; by no means a dramatic upgrade.
... but hey :)
The 'video' features touted in the headline have been in the last several models. The new 'features' include additional hardware buttons for when the device is in tablet mode; a collapsable CF slot (which can only be collapsed when not in use), a backlit keyboard, and an improvement over the NX series' cameras (1.3 MP on the NX80 - still not as good as the 2 MP camera on the NZ90).
Other inclusions are software based, including new Decuma handwriting recognition (supposedly nifty - especially for Asian character sets), and Sony's new CF driver allowing CF memory to be used - which isn't as powerful as Eruware's third party driver, since it doesn't support the built-in applications like playing audio off a CF card.
I'm obsessed with Clie's, and spend way too much time every day at www.cliesource.com
All in all, the NX73/80 are better than their predecessors but by no means exciting for those already owning a NX or NZ. I certainly don't think it deserves the fanfare the articles & slashdot headline etc are giving it - but hey thats PR for you.
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
...because Japanese companies do not waste time with suing each other for every little poop. American companies behave like a 3 year old whom the lollipop was taken away.
Now serious: Japanese are more ready to spend huge money on new neat innovative gadgets than enybody else in the world.
It is the perfect platform for testing new products... check this: Sony QUALIA 016.
I think it's because of all the feature-piling. I bought a Visor Neo a year or so ago and have no need for a new PDA in and of itself. The Neo does its job well. But the newer PDAs have cameras, mp3 players, color displays, etc. etc. Of course, sooner or later I will convince myself I can't live without these features, and my old Neo won't cut the mustard anymore. Or, more accurately, will seem like it won't.
Of course, piling on Bluetooth, video players, and other (IMHO, often superfluous) features jacks up the price. The barebones PDAs are still under $100. But there's no need to buy another one of those every year, so they have to drive the market somehow.
That said, when I do get a new PDA, it will be the Zire 71. All the features I need, and a couple I don't, for a (fairly) decent price. And no stupid built-in keyboard (I hate those things).
I have owned some Sony handhelds. Sony hardware is great, and PalmOS has going for it that there is a lot of software for it. But there are some real problems with the use of PalmOS on these devices.
For example, the Sony uses a different audio API from the Palm handhelds (because Palm didn't use to have an audio API) and Sony doesn't document it, so Palm audio players won't work on the Sony devices.
Also, many of the applications for Palm are specifically written for 160x160 pixels and will look absolutely horrible on a 320x320 screen. TopGun SSH is one of many examples.
Memory and memory management on these devices is also a problem. It is an enormous amount of work porting UNIX or Windows-based libraries to these devices, so a lot of software has to be written from scratch. And, in fact, a lot of pretty basic networking software just does not exist.
Applications also tend to crash with some frequency, which ends up rebooting the handheld (just like DOS).
PalmOS is designed with an "everything is a database" philosophy. Unfortunately, that runs into a brick wall when you stick in an SD or MS card, which, in fact, has a file system on it, and PalmOS doesn't deal well with it. Applications expect their data in particular subdirectories or ignore it. I have yet to figure out how to get the Sony movie player to play an MPEG file--I simply don't know where to put it on the memory stick and what to call it so that it will see it. And the lack of a file system inside the handheld means that installing and uninstalling applications is a complete mess: everything is just dumped into what amounts to a single top-level directory.
Sony does the right thing with these devices: they treat them as consumer gadgets. That is, they preload them with all the software you might ever want (including an MP3 player). The fact that they run PalmOS is almost incidental.
I think I can guardedly recommend the Sony handhelds since the hardware is nifty and the built-in applications are good (when they work). Just be aware of what you are getting and the limitations you have to live with.
SonyStyle says the Clié has a"High Performance CPU (200 MHz);" Is that really enough for video?
I very recently got a Tungsten T - it's great, and I love the fact it can play MP3s; even with a 128MB SD card, though, and using RealOne (transfer rates to the TT suck donk otherwise), it's still a little tweaky: That is, I can't use it to, e.g., read AvantGo offline (a 'core PDA function,' IMO) and listen to tunes seamlessly. Page scrolling slows. Music drops out. Timeouts shut the thing off completely.
Playing music is certainly a non-core function for a PDA, but it *wouldn't* be if the TT handled it to where I didn't have to be concerned about it.
If you're watching video on your new Clié, are you doing it because you Can, or because it Works?
Is any other company developing Palm machines?
Or even researching anything Palm hardware related?
Well, other than handspring adding a keyboard and palm changing the design of the buttons and trackpad.
We are testing the new Sony Clie NZ90 which comes with a 2 Mega Pixel camera, built-in Bluetooth, Palm OS 5, wireless LAN slot, voice recorder and a 320 x 480 pixel display. We are testing it with the add-on 802.11b wireless LAN WiFi card. It records video in MPEG-4 and plays back MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 (among other formats) so I'm not exactly clear on what the fuss is about here.
When I see a palmtop with a 2.5 or 1.5" hard drive inside it, then I might consider getting one with all those A/V features. Why is this so hard? I don't mind a palmtop as thick as an Ipod with similar battery life. In fact, it'd probably be better since many are pretty flimsy as it is. If 'real' mp3 players can incorporate a hard drive, why aren't we seeing this in palm devices?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
It's good to see the latest and greatest come out. It shows that the market's not dead. Granted, I don't ever see myself needing a 2MP camera on my PDA, nor do I even see the need for a color screen.
So what?
Someday, there may be a feature these contain that I just can't pass up. When that day comes, competition will have created the perfect PDA for me. For now, as odd as it is, I like the Newton.
There's usually one post in every PDA stories about the Newton, and I figure I might as well be that post.
Until I can get a PDA with handwriting recognition that WORKS WELL, and at least gives me some semblence of decent multitasking, I'll be sticking with my MP2100.
PalmOS is nice: it does what it needs to do, and little more. It makes an excellent organizer, and it's even nice to have buttons on the device. And I'll agree, Sony's design is quite asthetically pleasing.
But watching someone's Clié take its time drawing a single JPEG image is an amusing. And running programs like ICQ is still a futile endevor, because unless you want to manually poll the ICQ program, you can't use your PDA for anything but one task.
The Zaurus is much nicer, except the current OpenZaurus/Sharp ROMs are about as stable as a deck of cards. Still, it's very refreshing when I've managed to break it to the point of Qtopia not starting to be able to pull up a console, use SSH, download the latest image to a flash card, and reflash my device.
Windows CE, while multitasking, is the worst of the bunch. It's not fast like PalmOS or NewtonOS, it's not powerful like the Zaurus. It just... is. It's not intuitive (if you don't bring up the keyboard and type "Control-Q", you can't quit programs, and eventually the device will slow down,) handwriting recognition is the worst of the bunch (well, it's on par with the Zaurus, and no, the "Recognizer" in WinCE 3.5 doesn't work well at all,).
As with the other platforms, I think that PDAs are in a state of transition. PalmOS 6 should be an excellent operating system, and the PDA companies know that. Right now, they're loading propriotary extensions into the operating system for their whiz-bang features, like the Clié's audio, the 320x320 resolution (which, IIRC PalmOS5 supports natively now,) and the camera.
PalmOS 6 should be sweet, especially if they borrow liberally from the code they purchased from Be. The target system of BeOS was slower clock-wise than the top-end of the PDA market right now. The next PDA I buy, depending on how it turns out, may very well be a PalmOS 6-based device.
For now, while these Cliés are nice, there's always something that's slightly better just hanging on the horizon, and the longer I hold out, the better it will be.
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It is really interesting to me that neither the Sony product page nor the CNet article mention these device's power requirements or how long you can expect to use them before needing to recharge. When PDAs first hit the market, one of the selling points was how long you could go without changing the batteries. Then they became rechargeable, and for a little while the time between charges got some mention. Now, at least for these PDAs, it isn't mentioned at all.
What brought me in mind of this was a Steward Alsop article in Fortune magazine in which he notes that one of the hurdles to becoming truly wireless is the development of better mobile power sources. He neglects to mention the movement towards more efficient devices that is converging with efforts to find better power sources, but still he has a point.
Bureaucracy loves company.
You are begging the question here, assuming as true that which you wish to prove.
In some regards Japan is more advanced (robots, miniaturized consumer electronics, catering to every bizarre sexual fetish.) In other fields it is not (stealth aircraft, computer operating systems, GPS.)
Since WWII, Japan has not been allowed greater than a 1000 person National Guard
This is complete rubbish. The SDF is an army in all but name and far larger than 1000 men, although rather lacking in airlift and heavy weapons capability.
and is otherwise protected by the US's armed forces.
True. Damn freeloaders. But better that, than reviving the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
This has many effects. One is more money to spend on technological R&D.
Japan's government has poured billions down the R & D rathole, trying to choose technology winners in advance and shape their development. Remember fifth-generation computing? Most of this money is wasted, or at best can be described as subsidies for non-competitive but politically connected corporations.
Another is more money to spend on education, which leads to a smarter population capable of making huge technology leaps.
Much of the extra time spent on education in Japan is devoted to learning the 10,000 (or is it 25,000?) ideographic characters that an educated Japanese must know. We, on the other hand, learn our alphabet in first grade and add modest increments of orthography up to about sixth grade, after which it ceases to be taught at all.
Moreover, the Japanese educational milieu is brutally suppressive of creative thinking and independence. Regimented rote learning begins in early childhood and continues through the high school years, suppplemented by "cram schools" to prepare for the rigorous but irrelevant college entrance examinations. Once in college, students snooze through four years of studies. Even the mighty Todai is a joke compared to any second-tier research university in America, much less Harvard or Cal Tech.
After college, the salaryman goes to work in a big company doing mind-numbing work in a rigid hierarchy, churning out well-made but derivative consumer goods. Or he stays in academia where the hierarchy is, if anything, even worse. Maybe after he has been a professor's dogsbody for fifteen years he can get his name on a paper, or maybe not, if the lab director doesn't like him.
In truth, you could hardly imagine a system that would stifle independent thought more effectively. If the Japanese succeed in scientific endeavors like the blue LED, it is in spite of their educational system rather than because of it. And most of the true scientific breakthroughs seem still to come from us hairy gai-jin barbarians; the reams of patents the Japanese file are typically concerned with minor variations on trivial matters like building a better dildo or toilet.
As a final note, I have seen the inside of a Japanese classroom. It is spartan to a degree that would not be believed in even a poor neighborhood in the US. I guarantee you that we spend more per student per year in this country, especially in big-city systems where teaching and learning are secondary to providing jobs for otherwise unemployable union thugs and political hacks.
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.
Since you brought it up-- I assume what you are likely referring to is the racial and social strictures that would boggle the mind of most young Americans.
The Japanese are the most racist people on earth, by a wide margin. Koreans whose families have lived in Japan for centuries are denied citizenship and barely tole
Too much Law; not enough Order.
- long battery life (~1 month)
- tack sharp 320x480 B&W screen, good for outdoor, indoor and in-dark use.
- a compact size (Palm V)
- CF or at least dual SD slots.
- built in usb port.
I'd like- flash/static ram backup (so running out of batteries won't lose me all of my data).
- a thumb-keyboard (if it is removeable or doesn't add bulk) with vim.
- cheap I-net access (cell, WiFi, GPRS, GSM, I don't care).
- maybe txt2speech capabilities, that would be cool.
I don't want- battery draining color
- battery draining uber processors (my Mac IIsi had 20MHz and I ran Mathematica on it fer chrissake).
- an over-sized complex to use phone.
- a un-ergonomic crappy lens digital camera.
- half-assed MP3 playback
- half semi-assed audio recording (unless it has automatic transcription, but we ain't gonna see that for at least 5 years.)
- half semi-demi-assed video playback.
I don't care if it's running Palm, WinCE or Linux as long as it doesn't crash more than once a month and boots up in less than 3 seconds. The closest thing is STILL the Handera 330 and it came out 2 years ago. I don't see progress, I see bloated, mediocre products designed with the mantra of "features good, more features better".There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I spent like a day in Tokyo looking for panty vending machines on behalf of many many people back home..
Do you know how many I found? None.. zero, zip, zilch.
Help a brother out, do you know where these panty vending machines are?