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Sony Switches To Its Own Processor For Handhelds
Pointing to this Associated Press story carried by the Miami Herald, Jorkapp writes "Sony has announced that they will be using Processors manufactured by themselves in their next generation of CLIE handhelds, which are due to ship this Semptember. This is only the first step though, as Sony is planning to use its own line of processors for the next generation of Playstation systems. This new processor will give users 16 hours of battery life (impressive!) and the ability to play video at a smooth 30fps."
And jake writes with a link to a story at mobilemag.com which also describes the new handhelds (the UX50 was mentioned the other day), and says "both the CLIE UX50 and UX40 handhelds will be available through American retailers in September for about $700 and $600, respectively, but can be pre-ordered now through Sony's website."
The story says you get double the battery life with an external battery pack. Man. This thing would be sweet for watching movies on airplanes!
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
The Clies are nifty hardware, but their software is getting weirder and weirder. Nominally, they run PalmOS, but the user interface is quite different and the Clies ship with a lot of applications that won't run on any other Palm.
Furthermore, some important Palm functions, like anything using audio, won't work on the Clies because Sony has created their own undocumented and proprietary APIs. Memory on these devices is also getting really strange, with 16M of RAM, 16M of more RAM that is somehow not quite as accessible, and 29M of built-in flash memory, plus some other RAM somewhere else for some other purpose.
Furthermore, Palm applications in general often don't scale well to high resolution or non-square screens, meaning that primarily applications designed for 320x480 landscape mode on these Clies will work well on them, while regular Palm applications will often just be scaled-up 160x160 windows.
I guess the best way to look at Clies is as consumer gadgets, not hardware running an operating system: you get the software that comes with them. Some additional Palm software may work on them, but perhaps not all that well.
I wish Sony would just put Palm out of their misery and buy them. They could then do something sensible like put PalmOS on top of a decent kernel, like Linux, QNX, or Symbian, while keeping the existing applications; those kernels could do as good a job at running existing Palm applications as PalmOS 5 does, and they don't suffer from the same memory management or driver stupidity as PalmOS. They would also make PalmOS a much more credible platform for enterprise apps. And, unlike PalmOS 6, they are here right now, they are debugged, they are mature, and they are efficient.
The Sony Handheld Engine has an ARM 926 core. It has to be ARM, because Palm OS 5 doesn't run on anything else.
Proprietary != Incompatible.
The new Sony CPU mentioned in the article is a fairly normal ARM core with Sony's choice of peripherals built on-chip. This is a perfectly normal thing to do in the industry.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
I love it! I love it! Sony says here (if that bizarrely long URL doesn't work, just go to SonyStyle, search on UX40, and click the Specifications tab):
"Computer Interface: The computer industry lacks standards, and therefore, there are a multitude of varying software packages and add-on hardware options. This device is not manufactured to any specific software, and Sony does not and cannot make any warranty or representation with respect to the performance of this product with any particular software packages and/or non-Sony add-on hardware option except those mentioned in this document. Sony hereby disclaims any representations or warranty that this product is compatible with any combination of products you may choose to connect. While Sony representatives or Sony authorized dealers may be able to assist you and may make recommendations, they are NOT authorized to vary or waive this disclaimer. Purchasers must determine for themselves the suitability and compatibility of the hardware and software in each and every particular instance."
Now, I ask you, ain't that the truth?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Do you own a Playstation2? That's got all sorts of proprietary hardware in it. Can you run Linux on it? Yes, you can.
No, you can't. Not really.
Sony sells a Linux kit, but Linux does not run on the PS2. Sony's proprietary software runs, and creates a virtual hardware environment which runs Linux. Linux does not have direct access to any PS2 hardware, and since that hardware is proprietary, it can't run without proprietary Sony software.
Several months ago, I bought a Clie PEG-SJ20. I have used the daylights out of it since then, running third-party software and X-Master hacks (think old MacOS-style INITs) galore and even using a [Sony-built or at least Sony-endorsed] external keyboard. Every Palm app I've tried has run flawlessly; this includes even a few featherweight music composition apps which use the built-in piezo buzzer thingy to play tunes. Maybe the parent post was referring to sampled audio, which my unit doesn't support. I do want to assure the reader, though, that the buzzer interface is apparently compatible.
In all cases, my Clie delivers at least the functionality of a "normal" Palm handheld; in most cases, a superset thereof. My unit's screen is 320x320. Sony has a few (disable-able) hacks in place that can hi-res-ify some text in non-Clie-savvy apps, but, at worst, everything is pixel-doubled and looks just like it would on a normal, 160x160 Palm. I don't know what they have it do on 320x480 Clies. One would hope it wouldn't stretch things disproportionately. Can anybody chime in on this? (I must rave about the screen: it has stunningly good contrast and beautiful white LED backlighting. It looks like a sheet of paper, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. (Look at one in a store, making sure you have the brightness turned up to a reasonable level.) If you want to do high-framerate stuff like games or autoscrolling text, though, buy a different model, because it smears like mad.)
As far as the Clie-only apps Sony ships, I expect that restriction is due to the custom hi-res API's Sony has bolted onto Palm OS 4. If you circumvented the do-not-copy bit (try the Palm app "FileZ") and tossed them onto a non-Sony Palm, they'd doubtless fail because the API's they call aren't there. Now, with Palm OS 5, Palm has written a standard hi-res API, so I expect Sony's OS 5 handhelds use--or soon will use--that instead.
A couple other tidbits:
P.S. What do you have to do to post an — around here?
The landscape form factor makes it look bigger than it really is. Check these stats out:
It's a little "wider" than most PDAs, but it's only marginally larger in the other dimensions than a T|T, which is pretty darned small. palminfocenter.com has a picture of a Sony executive holding up a UX50 "prototype". In context, it looks rather normal-sized.
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