New Clie Is a Swing and a Miss
Sony Corp., which last year swung and missed on its Clie hand-held device, keeps stepping up to the plate in the PDA pennant race. But its newest model, the Clie PEG-N610C, could easily be considered Strike 2.
Built around the Palm operating system, the $399 PEG-N610C has some nice features. It is stylish and lightweight with a bright color screen. Users can add Sony’s Memory Stick technology to boost storage from the built-in 8 megabytes to as much as 128 MB. And it’s about $50 cheaper than Palm’s m505 color hand-held.
Despite these advantages, the PEG-N610C just doesn’t feel right. It seems a bit too petite, and the screen--capable of a high-resolution 65,000-plus color display--is perhaps 20% smaller than the display on the comparable Handspring Visor Prism. Because color is most useful in applications such as directional maps and photo displays, a larger screen makes more sense.
Clie seems positioned as a true digital wallet--a personal digital assistant that holds contact and appointment information as well as photos of the family. That’s not necessarily a bad approach, but it doesn’t work well.
For example, the unit has photo album software but no means to connect even the smallest of clip-on digital cameras. By contrast, the eyemodule2 slips into the expansion slot of a Handspring Visor, making it sensible to take pictures on the unit and then display them. Hewlett-Packard’s Jornada hand-helds have a similar digital camera option, and clip-ons exist for some Palm models as well.
The unit can play small video clips, but there’s no mechanism--or connection--to play MP3 files, unless one moves to the next model in the series, the $499 PEG-N710C. Sony said that this was to differentiate the models, but the company is also due to announce today that a clip-on MP3 player will be available for about $117.
Communications options are limited to either a clip-on 56-kilobit-per-second dial-up modem or a wireless attachment that uses a PC Card modem for communications via the Go America network. These limitations--shared by some Palm models--ignore the Bluetooth “personal area network” and the IEEE 802.11b wireless networking standard.
On the plus side, the jog dial mounted on the left side makes navigating the menu and individual programs easier. The unit seems to recharge pretty quickly--a drained battery took a full charge in about 90 minutes.
But Sony needs to do a lot more consumer research and fix some of the Clie’s shortcomings before it loses any turns at bat.
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Mark A. Kellner is a freelance technology writer and hosts “Mark Kellner on Computers” at https://www.adrenalineradio.com from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursdays.
