Most PDAs, it seems, try to be as light, as portable, and as inexpensive as they can possibly be, while still allowing you to enhance the device with peripherals. But that's not quite the strategy of Sony's higher-end Clié handhelds, which feature comparatively large screens, multiple card slots, and a host of other features. The $599 US Clié PEG-NX70V is a case in point: Dubbed a "Personal Entertainment Organizer," this handheld has a 320-by-480-pixel screen and slots for both Memory Sticks and CompactFlash cards. It sports stereo sound, so you can use it as an MP3 player. Oh, and it also has a built-in digital camera that can capture movies as well as photos. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow one for a week, and I found it to be quite an entertaining device.
The Clié comes in a box full of goodies: in addition to the usual software, cradle, and AC cord, Sony also throws in a pair of stereo headphones; a clip-on remote, further enhancing its MP3-playing functions; and a hand strap. The latter might be useful for some, because the Clié is bigger than most PDAs, and on the heavy side. It's 5 3/8" tall (a little over a full inch taller than my Palm m500), and though it's a bit over 1/4" deep on the bottom (about the same as an m500, with its lid), the built-in Compact-Flash slot up top makes it 7/8" deep at its deepest point. And the Clié weighs 7.5 ounces to my m500's 4.5.
But after adjusting to its bulk, I became impressed by its workmanship. This is one solid lil' handheld. The screen is in the lid, and like the body of the device, it's ensconced in fairly durable magnesium. The lid is connected to the body via a sturdy hinge, which conceals the camera; just roll it out with your thumb when you're ready to shoot. It's got a Record light as well as a Power light--telling me that Sony really meant business when the company endowed this "personal entertainment organizer" with stereo sound--and it's got a shutter/record button on the left side of the hinge.
I let it charge for a good long time as the power light glowed green, and when it was ready to roll, the power light shut off. I appreciated this feature, because my Palm m500 glows green whenever its plugged in, so you never know when it's ready just by looking at it.
When I first turned on the Clié, I heard some pleasant, futuristic sounds, and an animated Flash demo filled its entire screen. As I navigated through the demo, I was impressed by the image quality; photos looked very rich and bright. And I noticed a curious thing: when the demo played, the whole Graffiti-writing area, including the hot spots for Home, Menus, Calculator, and Find, vanished to make room for it. This was the first time I'd ever seen a Palm whose Graffiti-writing area was part of the screen, instead of fixed. And you can collapse it, for a much bigger, usable screen.
At first, I found the feel of the Clié to be very awkward. The monitor, as I said, is in the lid. On the base, which you hold in your hand, are the application buttons (for Date Book, Address, Memo Pad, and To Do List, although you can map them to any application you want), and Up and Down buttons. Below the buttons, on the base, is a small QUERTY keyboard, with small rubber keys that are easy to trigger with a thumbnail or a stylus. What's awkward about this arrangement is that most of the time, I was using what was on the lid, not what was on the base, yet it was the base I was holding in my hand. It was almost as if I needed two hands to hold the thing.
Now, I had read that the Clié has a "swiveling" screen, and the beauty of this feature didn't quite sink in; I thought it swiveled so that it would be easier to show off pictures. But it wasn't until I had one in my hand that realized the true purpose of the swivel: grab the screen, and swivel it to the right. Keep swiveling until it faces completely away from you, and when it's completely turned around, you'll feel a slight click and hear a short beep, and the entire screen, complete with Graffiti-writing area, will turn upside down. At this point, I was still confused. "Why would anyone want to do this?" Then I slowly closed the lid, screen now facing outward and upside down, and when I did, I now had a Clié I could hold in one hand. The screen is now right-side up, of course, and the navigation buttons and keyboard are concealed within.
When the Clié sits in its cradle, you can't gain access to the stylus, since it's stored on the bottom of the handheld. So Sony placed a pen-holder on one side of the cradle, and when the Clié is swiveled around to "keyboard-concealing mode," it makes a nice device when sitting in the cradle, with its stylus poised and ready for use.
By default, the Clié has a completely different way of representing files than other Palm OS 5 devices, and this is what it looks like:
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| A New Face. By default, the Clié opens using the Launcher View. |
On the upper left, you can scroll through categories, and in the main panel to the right, you can scroll through the applications themselves. I found it hard to adjust to this interface because for some reason, I like to know the perimeter of any interface I'm using. This interface, however, just keeps going around and around. I learned, however, that you can switch to the regular Palm OS interface, which I greatly appreciated.
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| A Familiar Face. Under Application Options, you can choose to view your files using the traditional Palm OS 5 view. |
Graffiti works a little differently on the Clié. When you write a character, a slight trail follows the stylus and then fades, to aid with character recognition. But I found it a little distracting, since I'm fairly fluent in Graffiti, and I couldn't find a place to turn this feature off.
When I popped in a Memory Stick, the Clié beeped contentedly, and the Memory Stick was available to many applications. It even showed an icon of the Memory Stick at the bottom of the screen near the battery. But when I popped in a CompactFlash card from a digital camera, even though it beeped in the same cheerful way, the only app that could see it was Card Info, and when it did, the parameters for size and Device ID--the only parameters apparently available--were blank. So it seems as though, out of the box, the CompactFlash slot is only for peripherals, such as Sony's WiFi card; this is probably why Sony refers to this slot as the Wireless Communication Slot.
As I began to explore, I soon discovered that the Clié ships with quite a selection of apps. I won't cover the usual Palm OS apps, which ship with any Palm handheld running OS 5. But here's the rundown on all of the Clié-specific ones:
AudioPlayer: A very cool app that plays MP3s and other sound files. It offers a few different sound settings, and can equalize the volume from song to song. I'll talk more about the Audio Player in a bit.
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| Rock On. AudioPlayer is a simple but capable MP3 player. |
Clie Album: An app for displaying collections of photos.
Clie Camera: The Camera interface, with a few useful options, such as the ability to change the resolution, brightness, and white balance. This is the Clié's standout feature, I believe, and I'll tell you more about this, and show you its pictures, below.
Clie Memo: Like Note Pad, but with a bit more features, such as the ability to use different colors.
Clie RMC: A remote control interface that can actually drive a number of TVs and VCRs. This works surprisingly well from our couch, which is about six feet away from the tube.
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| Couch-Potato Power. Yes, you can even control your TV and VCR with the Clié. |
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Clie Viewer: An app for displaying photos and playing sounds.
Flash Player: Indeed, a Flash Player for the Palm OS. Capable of playing any Flash files built for Flash Player 5.
Movie Play: Plays movies in full-screen, half screen, portrait, or landscape.
Movie Rec: Same as the camera app, but for movies with sound. Image quality is decent (I'll go into detail when I talk about the camera below), and they play smoothly with clear sound quality on the Clié. Two-minute movies with sound only take up about 16 kilobytes. Unfortunately, they're stored in .mai format, and I couldn't figure out how translate them into QuickTime--otherwise, I'd share a few with you.
Photo Editor: This app won't spell the end of Adobe Photoshop, but it does pack a few useful tools for adjusting the brightness and contrast; painting; erasing; and adding pieces of clip art such as knives and forks, smileys, and birds.
PhotoStand: This app plays slideshows of your pictures, using transitions and music.
Voice Rec: Very similar to Movie Rec, this app takes the audio without the movies.
Clie Files: A file browser for copying, moving, or deleting any file on the Clié or Memory Stick.
MS Backup: A utility for backing up all data from the Clié to a Memory Stick (it won't back up selected files).
MS Import: This simple, miraculous utility lets you mount a Memory Stick on the desktop (even a Mac desktop) when the Clié's in the cradle. From there, you can use the Memory Stick as you would any disk, to store whatever you want.
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| Stay Connected. When you see this message on your Clié, you'll also see your Clié's Memory Stick on your Mac or PC. |
Sound Utl: This app plays a variety of stereo sound files, such as chirping birds, ringing telephones, etc., which you can use as alert sounds in Date Book and World Alarm Clock.
The Clié Camera app is slick-looking and easy to use, and it has a few useful features. (Unfortunately, my screen-shot application doesn't work with the Clie Camera app for some reason, so I can't show you the interface--but I'll show you some photos.) It's got a 1x digital zoom, you can adjust the brightness and white balance, and you can apply a few effects, such as sepia tone, posterization, and negative.
The camera doesn't provide the best image quality, but it's a big improvement over a few PDA cameras I've seen. Colors and details are "in the ballpark," but subtle artifacts appear where there should be clean lines, noise peppers the photos during low-light conditions, objects over four feet away lose considerable detail, and overall, images are a bit blurry. Finally, while the Outdoor white balance tended to saturate images with way too much red, the Indoor setting left images a bit too blue.
 
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| On top is a photo taken with the default settings (Indoor A), and on the bottom, an image taken with the Outdoor settings. The image on the bottom has a bit more richness, but overall, the image has a lot more red than there is in real life. | |
That said, many of these defects are hardly noticeable if you're shrinking the image and displaying them on the Web. Not being a professional photographer, I'd describe the image quality as "serviceable," but I'll let you be the judge: my girlfriend and I took the Clié along for a short road trip, and we took a few pictures.
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| Left: Starting Out. When we left the house, we saw these Birds of Paradise bathed in sun. They probably got a bit too much sun, since it's bleached out in places. I used the Outdoor white balance setting for the rest of these, and you can see that there's quite a lot of red in this image. Middle: Smile! Despite the sun that poked through in places, it was still chilly, windy, and overcast in the morning, and Hannah's braced for it. Right: Zooming In. We had started off in the direction of the neighborhood rose garden to do some exercises, when we came upon this creature. Using the 1x digital zoom, I was able to frame him, but the camera didn't capture a tremendous amount of detail in the pavement. |
  
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| Left: Captive Audience. This poor fella wasn't too happy about being tied up, but he obligingly posed for us. Middle: Here Comes the Sun. The sun came out in full, but we couldn't capture much of the detail in the garden. Right: On the Road. We finally made it up to Point Reyes, in Northern California, and it turned out to be a gorgeous day. There's always one lucky shot in a batch, and I think this is it. |
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| How Now? If you look really carefully, you can see the full moon in the background. We waved goodbye to the local residents and began the drive home. |
I use both PCs and Macs at home, but most of my data, including my Palm-related files and applications, are on my Mac. The Clié is a Windows-only device, but rather than test it out with the PC, I thought I'd use it with my Mac, via the Missing Sync, a $40 piece of software from Mark/Space (www.markspace.com) that lets Cliés converse with Macs. When I first installed the software, restarted, and hit the Sync button, I got the message "Preparing to Sync..." and it hung there for a good long time until I cancelled. I pressed the Sync button immediately afterward, and it worked like a charm.
After I was syncing away smoothly, I soon learned that the Missing Sync provides even more thorough support than the basics. If you tap on the app called MS Import, the Memory Stick will mount right on the Mac desktop. You can then use this just as you would any disk, to store any kind of files you want. So you can just drag your photos onto your Mac, or drag MP3s to the Clié. But it gets better.
To Import Photos Using iPhoto, mount the Memory Stick on the desktop with MS Import. Then open iPhoto, which will immediately recognize the Clié, and then click Import. To export photos from iPhoto to view on your Clié, it's a bit more complicated: Choose Export from the file menu, hit the Missing Sync Tab, hit Export, and choose the 101MSDF folder on the Memory Stick (it took a little trial and error to learn that this was the best place to put photos from the desktop).
When I first tried out the Clié's MP3-playing capabilities, I moved a few MP3 files to the Memory Stick directly, storing them in Palm/Programs/MSAudio. I tapped on the Audio Player, and the app immediately cued up the first track I had copied. I plugged in the included stereo headphones, hit Play, and my hair practically stood up on my head, the sound was so good. I was impressed at how easy this was, but if you use iTunes, it's even easier: mount the Memory Stick using MS Import. Then open up iTunes, and the Clié will be listed as a Source, just like an iPod. Then you can copy via drag and drop, or Import.
How much fun can one gadget contain? Plenty. The Clié has it all, and then some. However, it sure is big, and heavy. I like to keep my Palm m500 in the front pocket of my jeans or the breast pocket of my jacket, pretty much all day, and I couldn't do that with the Clié. But I think it would make quite an entertaining travel companion, especially if I were leaving my laptop at home.
David Weiss is an Oakland, California based freelance writer. He's worked as a senior editor at Macworld magazine, and as the lead editor of MacHome Journal. Read more about David at www.davidweiss.net.
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