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."

Comments

Five-to-TEN hours of video!

[HisMother]

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!

nice hardware, weird software

[73939133]

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.

Re:nice hardware, weird software

[mst76]

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.

In case you didn't know, at least until version 4, PalmOS was built on top of the AMX RTOS from Kadak. Alledgedly, their contract did not allow Palm to expose the multitasking API to developers, but some of their own libraries did make use of multitasking.

Re:just an ARM core in their ASIC

[Wesley Felter]

The Sony Handheld Engine has an ARM 926 core. It has to be ARM, because Palm OS 5 doesn't run on anything else.

Re:proprietary hardware

[worst_name_ever]

Even if the hardware is better, proprietary hardware is bad. It limits the choices of what you can do with the devicce you own.

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.