Product Review

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Sony Clie PDA

Gadgets!!!  If any of you all know me, you know that I just love gadgets.  One of my favorite gadgets are those little hand held computers or PDAs.  My first PDA was the Tandy PDA back 6 or 7 years ago.  I knew I was in love the first time that I saw one.  You could carry it with you, had a very long battery life, connected to your Dos Based PC, and had major "head turning" appeal.  In all actuality that Tandy really was only good for a couple of things, solitaire and reversi.  Sure you could store names, addresses, phone numbers, and your calendar, it was just very difficult to input anything of substance with the handwriting recognition software included.

While I abandoned the Tandy some time ago, I never abandoned the hope that one day I'd have the perfect portable, easy to use, feature rich, FAST, hand held computer.  I came close with a product called Clio.  The Clio was a very small, notebook computer like, Windows CE device.  It had a great screen, long battery life, full set of Pocket Office 2000 applications, it was just very slow.

I finally reached what I thought to be perfection when our company provided us with the Palm IIIx.  For the time it was fast, light, easy to use, worked with our office database software, had a very long battery life, and widely supported with third party software.  My Palm IIIx is still in use today.  When my wife Sue saw it, and liked it, I gave it to her.  Of course this did leave a gadget void in my life.  So the search was on to replace my beloved Palm IIIx.

There are few things that I love more than trying new computer gadgets. It has taken over a year, but I've finally picked a winner for me.  I had a few "wishes" for my next PDA.  I wanted it based on the Palm OS and not Windows CE, I wanted it to have a color screen, be fast, expandable, light, rechargeable, and inexpensive.  I have been looking and trying several models;

• Palm's: IIIx, 130, 505, & 515
• Handspring's: Prisim, and new Trio
• Sony's: Clie line of PDAs

Prices ranged from $139 refurbished all the way up to $600 new. (a great source for cheap PDAs is www.returnbuy.com) I finally settled on the Sony where all my wishes were met except the inexpensive.   I chose the Sony PEG-NR70V/U because of the shear volume of features, including an MP3 player, built in Digital Camera and programmable remote control to run your RV, VCR, stereo, etc.  All those features came at the steep price of 599.00. Fortunately I hit a deal at Dell's web site offering 10% off all PDAs and free shipping, so I came out ahead of the game on this one, saving about $90 on what I would have paid at my local Best Buy.

Now that I have my new gadget, let me give you the low down.  Basically I like it very much.  I needed the Palm OS based PDA because it links directly with Amicus Attorney which I use for my contacts, time billing, and calendar.  The Sony by far has the best color screen on the market with 320x480 resolution.  Palm and Handspring screens are basically 160x160 resolution.  This means that every thing you see on the Sony is clear, bright and crisp. The camera is a neat feature.  It captures only at 320x240 but for just a quick click it is great to have built in.

Other unique features are the Virtual Grafitti, a part of the screen used to input letters and numbers with the stylus.  Unlike most Palm devices where you are drawing on a special part of the unit with no visual feedback.  The Sony uses a portion of its display as the input section.  When you draw your letters you actually see how you are inputting things on the screen.  This has really helped me become more accurate. For all those that just can't get the hang of using the stylus, there is an integrated keypad.  The keypad is much faster when putting in larger volumes of data.  The ability to have each in one built in is a real plus.

Finally, one of the most important features that I really wanted was speed.  My old Palm IIIx was really slow.  The Sony boasts a 66Mhz processor, twice as fast as any other Palm Based PDA and you can really notice the difference.

I whish that I could say that the Sony was a "Grand Slam," but I can't.  There are several issues that I'd love to see resolved with this unit.  First of all is its total dependence on the memory stick to move certain data back and forth.  You cannot move any of the pictures captured with the built in camera off the Clie with out one. You can try to configure the Clie Mail application and send them to yourself but I've not figured that one out yet.  Sony's software installation is also very cumbersome leaving you wondering what you need and don't need to install to get things to work right.

Bottom line is that I would NOT recommend this unit to anyone unless they are as much of a gadget person as I am.  I'd still recommend Sony, just not this unit.  Their PEG-T615C/S Color PDA (shown left) is a very good fit for just about everyone.  And at $299 for a 320x320 color screen, 16 megs of ram, and Memory Stick expandability, it is a very good bargain.