It would be hard to find a more eye-catching, better-made and cutting-edge Palm-based personal digital assistant (PDA) than Sony's latest Clie NR70V.
Introduced in this column a few months ago, the NR70V will be available in Hong Kong next month for about HK$4,000.
You might cringe at the price tag but the NR70V is worth it. Moreover, there are inferior products selling for a lot more, including Research In Motion's BlackBerry, which was introduced this week at prices of up to HK$5,400. Sony offers its new Palm OS hand-held with some mouth-watering goodies including a screen capable of displaying more than 65,000 colours, a built-in keyboard, 16 megabytes of Ram, a digital audio and video player, and a low-resolution 100,000-pixel digital camera, all neatly packaged in a cool clam-shell case that swivels and twists around.
Another new Clie, the PEG-NR70, is available without the camera. A really cool feature on the NR70 and NR70V is it can be used as a digital photo stand by inserting a Memory Stick with images. The only features missing are integrated wireless connectivity, audio recorder, machine translation software and phone functions. The NR70V can be given Bluetooth connectivity with the Bluetooth Memory Stick but it would be better to have 802.11b integrated so I could do away with the hot synching cradle and move data wirelessly. An audio recording function might not interest everyone but it might appeal to students who want to record lectures. A microphone could be sold as an option.
I am not sure about integrating telephony in the Clie but I decided to mention it because more than a few people said they would buy the NR70V immediately if it was a phone too. A converged Clie featuring global system for mobile communications-general packet radio service capabilities will be available next year.
I drop my mobile phone often so I would not want my PDA and phone to be integrated in one device because if dropped it the liquid crystal display would crack. I used to have a Handspring VisorPhone and while there were some small merits, it was too unwieldy to carry and untangling the hands-free device was a pain.