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KellyHogan · Jun 12, 2002, 04:48 PM

I know this is the wrong forum but the PDA forum seems to have died and many PDA users here seem to be skipping the forum because of the lack of activity.

Anyway, today I went and bought the new Sony NR70V PDA with Palm OS, built-in camera and built-in keyboard. It's a very beautiful PDA, design like the Vaio and Ti-Book. It has a great high-res screen too.

I wanted to see if this could replace my trusty two year old Cassiopeia E-115. The screen looks almost as good but has a higher resolution (when apps written for it take full advantage of it), a faster than usual CPU for a Palm and Documents To Go so that I can get some decent word processing on the road and in my pocket without having to lug a laptop around.

At first it looked pretty decent, text looks sharp but not smooth. Some of the Clie apps are really good looking like the remote control, which does work on my video, and the World Clock. But most Palm apps still look crumby and don't take advantage of a high res and high color screen.

This PDA can be used in clamshell/flip up mode or, if you wish, the screen can be swivelled around and then turned over so you can use the PDA in pure tablet mode.

The OS is quite snappy on the 66Mhz Dragonball CPU but it did freeze up once and require a hard reset. My E-115 which runs Pocket PC 2000/Win CE 3.0 has never locked up in two years and has proper multi-tasking. Speed-wise, the Palm OS feels a little snappier but not that much, we're talking milliseconds.

I was disappointed to find that my main reason for buying the PDA, the high res screen and word processing, was badly limited. Documents To Go's word processing has only the most basic functions, you can't double click select words, you can't draw basic tables or use bullets. There is also no font support, only a choice of three font sizes. And the application is not aware of the high res screen and thus you can only use a small portion of the available display to view your documents. This makes the whole thing useless for me.

The other bad thing was the keyboard. It is basically a thin film of plastic that will wear away and crack after maybe only a few months usage. Since the buttons are so small you have to dig into them with your nails and no doubt that will cut into the plastic after a while.

The music playback functionality is also limited to AC3 tracks on the memory stick. But I have an iPod so I didn't buy the PDA for music. Built in sound is basically FM bleeping noises emitted from a mono-speaker. My E-115 has stereo sound and can handle mp3 and wma files in software while multitasking several apps at once. And that's a two year old PDA and OS not half as fast as new Pocket PCs.

So it looks like the Clie is going back to the Sony store. They said that if it didn't do what I wanted it to do then I had seven days to return it. What it really doesn't do that it would have had to do is synch with my Mac. It doesn't. Neither does Documents To Go. Out of the box Mac support was zero and required me to download Palm Desktop from Palm. USB synching did not work though XP support was perfect for obvious reasons.

If I had to give marks for this PDA it would be:

Quality 7/10
Features 8/10
Compatibility 5/10
Speed and Usage 4/10
Value 5/10
Overall 5/10

[ 06-12-2002, 05:05 PM: Message edited by: KellyHogan ]

Mastrap · Jun 12, 2002, 05:01 PM

I bought the Palm keyboard for my PalmVx to do basic word processing and email writing on the move. It was a total waste of money, I might have used it twice. I was doing a pan-European production at the time (oh the good times of the .com boom) and wanted to avoid schlepping my Laptop around. Once I've found out that the Palm is just way too slow to handle any serious text input I went ahead and bought an iBook instead.

I am thinking about upgrading the Vx but I can't really see anything that offers anything that it can't do. Also times are harder than they used to be, gigs are harder to come by and money's tighter. I'll wait...

KellyHogan · Jun 12, 2002, 05:05 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Mastrap:
I bought the Palm keyboard for my PalmVx to do basic word processing and email writing on the move. It was a total waste of money, I might have used it twice. I was doing a pan-European production at the time (oh the good times of the .com boom) and wanted to avoid schlepping my Laptop around. Once I've found out that the Palm is just way too slow to handle any serious text input I went ahead and bought an iBook instead.

I am thinking about upgrading the Vx but I can't really see anything that offers anything that it can't do. Also times are harder than they used to be, gigs are harder to come by and money's tighter. I'll wait...<hr /></blockquote>Forget about it. At best the iPaq with its new thumb keyboard add on is the best choice. I also played around with a Sharp Zaurus with built in keyboard. It runs Linux and is also much better than the Clie or any Palm but the compatibility and the synching is just not standard stuff. Mac support is zero.

I thought about selling my Ti-Book and downgrading to an iBook because the Ti is simply not discreet enough for me to use outdoors (I use it on the sofa and in the bedroom and kitchen) but I would miss that extra width even if I could use it better outdoors. Shame there is no widescreen iBook.

Buckaroo · Jun 12, 2002, 05:24 PM

Thanks for the info. Now I'm not sure what I want to do.

I have the Palm m505. It is almost impossible to see the screen. When I saw the NR70V I was excited. It looks pretty neat, but I am concerned about some of the issues you pointed out.

I don't know if I want to upgrade or not. I was concerned about that pivot point for the screen. I was wondering how long would it take before that breaks or wears out.

KellyHogan · Jun 12, 2002, 05:48 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Buckaroo:
Thanks for the info. Now I'm not sure what I want to do.

I have the Palm m505. It is almost impossible to see the screen. When I saw the NR70V I was excited. It looks pretty neat, but I am concerned about some of the issues you pointed out.

I don't know if I want to upgrade or not. I was concerned about that pivot point for the screen. I was wondering how long would it take before that breaks or wears out.<hr /></blockquote>That pivot seems solid but the main hinge seems a little wobbly. The keyboard is the main problem, it will damage quickly. If you must insist on a Palm device then wait for Palm 5 running on a much faster CPU and with enough RAM for the amount of money you pay. Otherwise go for an iPaq Pocket PC, they're much better I guess. You can use five different forms of input and because the CPU is faster and there is multi-tasking the input is faster. The input forms are:

-Character recognizer
-Character recognizer, Graffiti style
-Software keyboard
-Transcriber
-Hardware keyboard add on

And with compact flash and PCMCIA support you can also connect to an Airport or wireless DSL connection. There isn't proper Mac support but because the files created by Pocket Word can be opened (by changing the three letter extension) in Word X all you have to do if copy the file to a compact flash card and then use a card reader. Another good thing about the Pocket PC is that it has a file manager in order to do let you do that.

But I'm going off PDAs completely. Let's see how that Oqo turns out.

daimoni · 12:24 PM

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