Comments on: New Clié Available in Japan

It would be interesting to really see what the new Clie is all about and how it will stack up agains the rest of the new devices.

PalmPlan

MP3 Player...okay, Bluetooth...may be a bit early, but a knock out color screen?
YEAH!...I want to leave Pleasantville!!!

impossible to find here (in Canada) at all, i've only seen them down at circuit city in seattle when i took a trip there a week ago...

if they brought it out now in north america, they'd have a jump on the m505 before thats released, for sure.

on a side note to the m505, i was at Comdex Canada West in Vancouver today (13/03/01) and most of the Palm guys there said "no comment on any new Palm products", but i was able to get a little farther with one guy, who said Palm is NOT releasing anything next week (counter to the rumour that the m50x will be out march19) and as far as the model # of the "m505", there's no such thing as far as Palm Canada is concerned...

make of that what you will.

It's about time decent music & video came built in to a Palm OS device. Now the CE fools will have nothing on us.

WELL DAGNAMIT IF THEY HAVE THIS IN THE US TODAY WE'LL BE BREAKING DOWN THE DOORS AT CIRCUIT CITY/GOOD GUYS/BEST BUY/(FILL IN THE BLANK) FOR IT AND TAKE CARE OF THAT PESKY LITTLE SALES PROBLEM!!!!

Why can't I get these people to take my Money!!!!

As for Palm m505, I don't see why people are so hyped up on it. It's going to be a sack of sh*t.... no multimedia, no improved speaker, no aditional software, 160x160... whats the point? Its basically a color Vx with a SD slot.
Palm are so hopped up on their V series form factor and "keeping it simple" ... theres no innovation or anything...

Im saving my $$$ for the color CLIE!!

The capability of Clie is fantasitic, but it sticks with Memory stick, and Atrac player. You have to get everything from Sony to get all of the benefits. Sounds familiar?

I don't think Palm or Handspring would give us any better hardware. Wait and see what would the other japanese company, TRG, come up with. TRG is much smaller, so, I hope, it would not have such a stupid agenda.

But what are they doing to the Grafitti area? Way too many soft buttons!

Sorry, I deleted this comment because the extremely long link was throwing off the formatting for this page.

Here it is without the link:

English Traslation of the Sony.co.jp Press Release:
{long link to Babelfish deleted]

Better pictures and visual comparisons to other PDA's:
http://www.mobilenews.ne.jp/news/2001/03/14/clie/01sony.html

Rumoured Japanese Pricing:
US$420

We have a winner folks.

Eric

Palm resolution is 160 x 160. If you need to draw a palm app on the new screen you use vertical and horizontal pixel doubling. Instead of a single pixel you use 4.. No science there.

And PalmInfoCenter needs a new server or ISP. It get less readable every day.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-5133817.html?tag=mn_hd

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The latest model will be on sale around the world by the end of this year, said Shinsaku Inada, a Sony executive in charge of the company's handheld business.

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If it actually comes to the US in the $400 range, you won't be able to keep me from buying one.

Screw the m505, but then again, what will this dream machine cost?

Palming away.....

Japanese companies like Sony tend to mark new features of their products with nice icons. In the features page of the above Japanese site, there are two such icons. One reads: "High Resolution Font Utilized". The other reads: "High Resolution Image Font".

If you play video or listen to MP3, soon you'll be searching for some power outlet to recharge the batteries... bullshit.

Palm OS/Popular software+ PPC type hardware???

Maybe HP and others will soon jump ship.

Eston Bond
CEO Pine Tree Software
http://www.pinetreesoftware.net/

it's so god damn cool. shit. i want one now. i was thinking of getting the japanese one and trying to flash the rom and change the os to the engligh one (is that possible)???

No problem, I'll buy a Palm m505 or a Visor Prism!

Bye, bye, Sony...

Now wondering out loud is whether someone is going to take advantage of the colour and the greater resolution to write some mean games.

320X320 effectively translate to 128 dpi so really fine details can be seen compared to the Palm's normal 64 dpi or the WinCE's 96 dpi.

I reserved the CLIE N700C a couple of weeks ago from the Japanese Sofmap web site, and received the package from my friendly Japanese delivery service on April 7th!

After tearing open the package, I pushed the power button and was pleasantly surprised to see the CLIE power up! Wow, I had expected to at least to have to plug it in. I dug through the package to find the cradle and a power cable. The power cable is incredibly light; I still can't believe how they transformed 100V down to 7.5 in such a small, light plug. You can plug the cable into the back of the (USB) cradle, or you can plug the power cable straight into the CLIE. I plugged it into the cradle and set about to installing the software onto my PC. It was straight forward installing the new Palm Desktop and the OpenMG Jukebox onto my Japanese Windows 98 powered laptop. I copied my old palm programs from my desktop to the laptop, pressed the hotsync button and voila, 10 minutes later, my entire 7 Megs of junk ^h^h^h^h data was copied into my CLIE. Tried a couple of the programs to make sure that they would work, and so far most of it seems to be working.

My older palm is a Palm Pilot Personal fitted with the 8MB of TRG memory. The CLIE is about as thick as the Personal, but is quite a bit narrower than the Personal. For my small hands (4 1/4" tennis grip), the CLIE fits much better than my old Palm. The body is metal as the flip cover uses magnets to hold the cover in place. Very solid construction, I couldn't twist or contort the body; not that I'm trying that hard to break my new Sony!!!. It is also fairly heavy, so folks that are in love with their thinner, lighter Palm Vs probably won't be that thrilled with the CLIE. Personally I can handle the extra weight (it's not like I have to be like Ahnuld to lift it), and as I said before, the thinner body fits better in my hand than does the wider Palm Vs.

The buttons seem to be made from metal as well, and they have a short travel with a solid feel. A nitpick, just above the buttons and just below the grafitti area is a thin metal 'CLIE' nameplate. I would have preferred having larger buttons rather than wasting that area just for a nameplate. In particular, I'm not exactly thrilled about the smallish up/down scroll rocker.

The CLIE seems to recognize my grafitti fairly well. Changing the brightness from low to full doesn't seem to have any effect on grafitti recognition. I don't know about other CLIEs, but mine seems to have a pocket of air feeling with regards to the screen. With my older Palm, it feels like I'm writing on glass, whereas with the CLIE it seems to be writing on a plastic film that has a slight gap between the film and the screen itself. A bit disconcerting, although I don't know whether this will be a problem in the future. Another thing I will have to get used to is the smaller grafitti area due to the thinner body and space lost due to the specialized Japanese silkscreen keys.

I guess I should have talked about the screen first as that is what really took my breath away. I've only seen screenshots of the N700C on the net, and I wasn't really expecting that much since I expected the sales pictures to be doctored up. But the N700C is definately the new standard for color Palm screens. Without a doubt, the high-res applications look gorgeous, but even the normal (low res?) screens look much better than the IIIC or the Prism IMO. The N700C is much brighter than the pathetic 500C; I didn't have a IIIC or a Prism to compare the brightness, I suspect that they are about the same or that the N700C is a tad dimmer. However there is no distracting black matrix in the screen. The letters show up crisp and highly readable. I checked it out briefly outside as it was quite bright today and the screen was dimmer but still very readable. I hope that programmers will utilize the high-res capabilities of the N700C.

Unlike the older 300C/500C, the N700C does not come with a memory stick (MS); at least not the early version that I bought. To be able to play music, one needs a Magic Gate Memory Stick version, which is quite a bit more expensive than the normal Memory Sticks (10,000 yen for a 32MB MSMG as compared to 6,000 yen for a 32MB MS). The 128MB MSMG are supposed to be available around the end of this month. I converted a couple of my taiko wave files with the OpenMG Jukebox software. It's pretty straight forward. You can convert at 66/105/132 kbps. It took about 4 minutes to convert and download a 10 minute wave file. I converted at 105 and 66 kbps; it didn't seem to affect the conversion time. Both 105 and 66 kbps sounded good enough for me, but I doubt that taiko drumming taxes the conversion process much. I've read that it takes quite a bit longer to convert MP3 files, but I generally would work with a WAVE or a CD file rather than messing with MP3s. Personally even though I think I have tin ears, most MP3 files that I've checked out sound noticably bad. Unfortunately you can not listen to your music with the Palm speaker. You have to use the earphones. The included (cheap) earphones can be plugged directly into the CLIE or into a remote control which plugs into the CLIE. The remote control seems a bit flimsy, especially compared to the fine worksmanship of the body. You can use one end of the remote as a stylus. As compensation for having to use the earphones, you can listen to music as you run other Palm programs. It was pretty neat listening to my taiko drumming as I was hotsyncing new programs to try out :-)

The flip cover is a bit of cheap vinyl that can be flipped underneath the body when you are using the CLIE ... although that thickness is just enough to make my hand uncomfortable using it in that manner. I'll probably do the Trekkie flip move and leave the cover over the body as I use the CLIE.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, even with a 33MHz chip, this CLIE only benchmarks 137% on Benchmark2 (as compared to 204% of a Platinum with a similiar chip). Afterburner 3.0t only allows overclocking up to 37MHz ... which only nudged Benchmark2 to 140%. In actual use, compute intensive programs such as Tide Tool whiz along on this CLIE. Switching programs via LDA, ButtonOnHack, (ie alternative launchers) is also a snap. About the only noticable (and bothersome) delay is when I switch to the default launcher from a program.

While I've figured out how to run MSAutoRun, it still doesn't make much sense to me the way that it is implemented. I can't get MSMount to work either :-(

Well that's enough rambling for now. I'll probably come up with some more comments as I check out the capabilities. So far, it looks like a nice little unit. A bit expensive, but a drop dead gorgeous screen.

fujima@softhome.net