Header
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..Is it a Sony?
..Inside the Clié
..The Clié display
..The Clié and audio
..Hotsync connector and cradle
..Power supply and power consumption
..The Memory Stick
..OS 4.1
..This and that
..Bottom line
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Is it a Sony?
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The Clié 760 is the first Sony PDA I do a review for, since for me it seemed to be the first true Sony device regarding the features (except the 710 which I didn't get fast enough). Doing this review was a bit of a travel back to my roots. Back then, when I was a student, I made a living by modifying Sony audio devices and I took apart tons of them. I remember very well, how impressed I was already then about Sony's way to build electronics. They always seemed to solve even difficult details with ease, introducing nifty ideas and alot of custom made parts of course. I just loved their style and later as a professional hardware developer I always envied them for their technical possibilities as a huge company. So reviewing the Clié was nearly a matter of honor beside the fact, that I couldn't wait to see its 'guts' and to find out, whether it's a 'true Sony'. The Palm concept, keep it straight and simple, just didn't seem to fit Sony's philosophie. Their devices are normally stuffed with gadgets. But let's have a first look first ...
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The Clié comes in a silvery plastic case which is very much a matter of personal taste. The protective screen cover looks even shinier and flips open vertically. I don't like that orientation, but probably because I'm used to the Palm style horizontal lid. Though, a real disadvantage of the vertical lid is, that it covers the IR port when it opens. The Clié is about 8 mm narrower than an m505, but it's about 6mm longer. For people with smaller hands, the Clié is easier to hold. Unfortunately the Clié is also a bit thicker and heavier than a Palm m505. Including their standard screen covers, the m505 is 17 mm thick and weights 170 gram while the Clié is 20 mm thick and weights 190 gram. But both 'disadvantages' have a very good reason which I'll discuss in the power section. 
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All images on this site are available in highres, just click on the image.
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Like every Palm-OS driven PDA, the Clié has the typical hardware buttons in the typical locations. Though, the power button moved to the center of the unit all the way to the buttom. A tiny green LED in the power button indicates, that the Clié is running. Considering the 'HOLD' mode of the Clié, the LED makes sense. More about that a bit later. The application buttons are ok, but the scroll buttons are too hard to operate. Especially scroll up is really hard to press, partly because it's too flat. The reason for Sony to make the scroll buttons so flat and so hard to press was probably to prevent accidental operation when the unit is closed and sitting in your pocket. Palm has painful experiences with this matter. Additionally the Clié has alot of Sony typical details: On the left side the jog wheel, a 'back' or 'escape' button and the also Sony's typical 'HOLD' switch. As an external memory expansion, the Clié uses of course Sony's very own Memory Stick, right beside the IrDA window on top.
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But so far we didn't talk about the two real goodies of the Clié 760: The screen and the audio. The LCD shows 320x320 pixels in 65.000 brilliant colors and in the moment, it's for sure the best display you can get in a Palm-OS PDA. Although the Clié is narrower than an m505, the active screen size is exactly the same, the frame around the screen is just a little smaller. More about the screen in its own section. Apart from the usual Palm-style piezo speaker for alarms and system sounds, the Clié 760 has a dedicated stereo output for playing back MP3 and ATRAC encoded files. You'll even find a nicely designed headphone and a cable remote along with an 8 MB memory stick in the default supply. Just enough to try everything right out of the box. But the audio capabilities are also worth an own chapter further down. Let's finally look inside the Clié ...
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Inside the Clié
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After opening 3 tiny screws on each side, the case top can be removed. The rest of the disassembly is a bit tricky. The hotsync connector is fixed with two seperate screws and the audio plug and the jog dial are sitting on their own little PCB which is fixed seperately in the bottom of the case. All of these add-ons are connected with delicate plastic flat cables which have to be removed carefully before taking out the main board assembly completely. 
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The Clié is build like you would expect it from Sony. A high integrated modern design and quite rugged. In fact the plastic case is only a cover. Actually a stable steel frame protects and holds the main PCB and the screen. Sony's long time experience in designing and building mobile devices is clearly visible.
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After seperating the two layers - screen and main PCB - the Clié reveals quite some complexity. Like all Palm OS devices (in the moment), the Clié uses a Motorola Dragonball as the main processor. Sony also picked the 33MHz VZ type for their top model. Also Palm OS typical are the 8 MB RAM, the 4 MB Flash (to fit OS 4.x plus some Sony applications) and all the peripherials like IrDA, serial port and USB. Interestingly, there's room for another Flash chip on the main PCB. Either Sony wasn't sure to fit the OS and all their apps in the existing 4 MB, or they just reserved their chance to use also two 2 MB chips. Anyway, the space could be probably used to extend the Flash to 8 MB which makes alot of room for tools like FlashPro or Jack Flash (unfortunately FlashPro is not supporting the Clié up to now). Though, I'm not sure whether adding another Flash chip would be enough, since there's also empty space for some additional decoder chips which might be necessary.
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But the complexity of the Clié is made by two more high intergrated chips on board: One is the MQ1100 MediaQ controller which is a dedicated display and peripherial co-processor for the highres screen and it handles also the USB interface. The chip contains even more, but it's not 100% used in the 760. But already the USB implementation is worth a closer look, since there is a small but important difference compared with the USB port in the Palm m-series. USB connections are so called endpoint connections between a host (usually the PC) and a device (web cam, mouse etc.). You can't connect two devices, there has to be a host. The Philips controller in the Palm is only able to establish a connection as a device. So the Palm can only talk to a host, typical peripherial devices can't be used with the Palm. The MediaQ controller in the Clié can act as host or device. In other words, provided the right drivers are available, the Clié could talk to any USB device.
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The second LSI is the Sony CXD-1859 which is a very special audio controller that also takes care of the Memory Stick interface. That combination enables the Clié 760 to play back audio even in the background, since the hardware does most of the work. That chip also contains all the digital right management which seems so important nowadays for the poor, always betrayed right owners like Sony music. In other words, there is only one chip between encrypted data on a Memory Stick and the audio output - hard to hack! There's not much informations available if you're no member of the exclusive memory stick developers 'club', not even a datasheet of the chip. I only found a brief overview of the functional blocks, but that should do it for this review (no highres version, sorry <g>).
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The Clié display
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By far the most impressive detail of the 760 is the screen. With 320x320 pixels in 65000 colors on an area of about 2.1 x 2.1 inches the display has an impressive resolution of 150 dpi. Even a very good PC monitor reaches hardly more than 90-100 dpi. Additionally, the Clié has a very powerful frontlight for its LCD. Unlike the Palm m505, the light can be controlled in 32 steps with the usual Palm OS brightness/contrast slider. Thus, the light can be dimmer than on an m505 which is nice for nearly or total dark rooms. But it can also be much brighter than the light of an m505 and then the display produces nearly the same brilliant colors than a standard TFT backlit LCD. Since the screen is illuminated from the top, the viewing angle is limited. Viewed too much from top or side, the illumination system produces strange reflection effects. But that's a little concession considering the excellent display quality in bright light or outdoors in sunlight. Then you can switch of the backlight completely and just use the reflective layer of the LCD, saving alot of power.
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Sony was clever enough to integrate a picture viewer in the ROM and after a hard reset, you'll even find a sample 320x320 image on the Clié. The best description of that image is, that it looks like an excellent print glued to the screen. On the first sight, you won't believe that it's actually an LCD you're looking at. In one word: phantastic! But Sony did even a little more to make good use of their display. By default, all 'normal' 160x160 Palm OS applications are blown up by simply doubling each pixel in both directions to fill the entire screen. Even if that's a 'cheap trick', the display quality is still better just because the dark areas between the pixels are basically invisible on the Clié screen. In other words, even a simple white area is whiter on the Clié. But you can also enable a 'High Resolution Assist' which hacks into certain API calls of these applications and replaces the fonts with a highres font. Alot of apps look much better then. Every incompatible application, mostly graphic apps, can be individually excluded from that enhancement function. And there are of course applications written already for the high resolution LCD. My favourite is - once more - datebk4 from Pimlico Software. It's actively supporting high-res units. Using the small fonts whole stories fit in one day of the week view.
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As mentioned above, the screen is driven by that MediaQ controller, so the speed doesn't suffer from the many pixels that need to be handled. In terms of bytes compared to a black&white Palm device, the controller has some work to do. Once the 160x160 pixels fitted into 3.2 kByte of screen memory (1 bit per pixel). The Clié LCD needs 200 kByte or 64 times the memory (2 Byte per pixel). But the controller does a good job and so the Clié screen is fast and 'snappy'. It even supports playback of little video clips (there's even sound with the headphones), but I still wouldn't consider the Clié as a multimedia machine. Although Sony also stuffed a movie player in the Flash, the biggest drawback is a missing strong compression/decompression. Sure, you can store some short clips in 'showable' quality, but multimedia is something different. Still, the display capabilities of the Clié are simply breathtaking.
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The Clié and audio
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Before I knew more about the hardware of the 760 I was quite skeptical about an MP3 player in a Palm OS device. But Sony made no compromises on that part and so the Clié is as good as any standalone player, if not better. How many MP3 player have a 150dpi high color display to show titels, running time, etc.  ... :)
The Clié comes with quite nice headphones and a cable remote, so you can leave it in your pocket and still control the usual functions like start, stop, volume, titel skip and search. No need to mention that a Sony remote has its own HOLD switch to lock all buttons.
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The headphones not only look good (kind of mother-of-perl finish), but have also a nifty way to go on the ear. A springloaded 'earpiece' holds each speaker comfortably in place, tight enough to go jogging with them. The sound is above average considering the normally supplied headphones. They plug into the remote control which again plugs into the Clié with a proprietary extented stereo plug for the additional remote signals. If you don't need the remote functions, any standard 3.5mm stereo plug goes also in the Clié directly. All in all a very 'Sony-like' solution, nice and well working.
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Another application Sony packed into the Flash is the audio player. It's probably the nicest application on the Clié and handles all MP3 related matters. It plays MP3 from RAM or directly from a Memory Stick. It also plays ATRAC encoded files, but only from a special, white Memory Stick type named 'Magic Gate'. The Magic Gate stick is basically Sony's version of the SD-Card and has an integrated right management. Although ATRAC offers presumely MP3 quality at an even lower memory consumption, I never tried it. I'm strictly against the agressive attempts of the industry to control more and more when I'm allowed to listen to what music on what device. Understand me right, I never ripped illegally a single MP3 file, but I own quite a few CDs I collected in my not so short live so far. Most of the artists and studio bosses that got my good money for these CDs are getting bigger pay checks than I get, and so the least I can ask for is to be able to copy, mix, recompile and convert that music collection as often and as free as I think it's convenient for me. I want to burn a collection for my car, copy them to a minidisk for travel or convert them to MP3 for the Clié. In the end it's always only me listening to it with my very own 2 ears at a time. So I'll never buy a Magic Gate stick and use a 128 MB standard Memory Stick for MP3 only instead.
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The transfer of MP3 files (but not only MP3) is very convenient once you installed an extra USB driver on your PC. Apart from the usual Hotsync protocol which is quite slow by definition, Sony implemented an additional file transfer protocol which lets the Clié basically act like the usual USB-card readers. The function is activated either in the audio player menu or with a standalone application called 'Import'. It establishes a connection with the PC and the memorystick appears as a drive on the PC with all the usual explorer functionality. That's not only more convenient, it's also much faster than the Hotsync protocol. One hour of MP3 music (encoded with 128kbit/sec.) takes only 2 minute to transfer.
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So once everything is in place, launch the Audio Player which is also residing in Flash. It's a beautiful app with all the standard MP3 options. It shows ID3 tags, can shuffle titles and handles whole albums. But the real surprising thing is, it can play music in the background and it doesn't even slow down the Clié a lot. But first the background operation has to be enabled in the player preferences, after all a little system perfomance penalty has to be payed. In numbers: Benchmark 2.0 rates the Clié normally with 212% (relativ to a Palm IIIxe). When the background playing is just enabled but no music is playing, the rating drops to 198%. When the player is busy playing an MP3 file, the rating is dropping to 187%. Considering the Clié is anyway quite fast, the speed penalty is well worth the ability to listen to music while doing other things. In my opinion there's only one logical flaw: System sounds are also played back through the headphone and apart from the usual Palm OS option to disable the sounds completely, the Clié OS has no possibility to seperate that sound path to the headphone. So playing a game with lots of sound while listening to MP3 is only possible if you mute the game completely or if you're enjoying alot of additional beeps in your favourite tune. IMHO, Sony just forgot a control that cuts off the headphone output from the system sounds and leave them on the piezo only.
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While listening to music, you can also put the Clié into a special sleep mode with the HOLD key. In that mode, the LCD is off and the power consumption drops considerably. Sonly claims 11 hours of continuous operation in that mode. The cable remote remains still functional, unless you lock it with its own HOLD switch.
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Unfortunately Sony didn't implement any sound recording capabilities. This is a great pity, since the sound chip in the Clié has alot of encoding capabilities too and I doubt anyway, that it was always that clear for Sony's engineers that no sound recorder will make it into the Clié. If you're looking a bit closer at the upper case lid, you'll find a hole in the plastic just in the right place (seen from behind, right/down) and just made to take a little microphone like the ones used in mobile phones. That dent has no other function. But in the moment at least, the Clié can't record sound (like the HandEra 330 for example, naming a PalmOS device that can). 
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For the curious of you, below is an image of the remote PCB. No big deal, just some buttons and (I assume), some 'encoding' resistors.
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Hotsync connector and cradle
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Since my last review was about the Palm m505 and Palm's new 'universal connector' turned out to be at least a very questionable design, it was a relief to see Sony's well working solution. The Clié has a 13-pin connector which is made of simple gold plated contacts. Flat and fixed on the Clié and spring loaded on the cradle or the cable connector the parts connect and part easily and smooth. Although Sony uses 2 separate cables for the USB and the power connection, I like their solution alot. The USB cable is fixed to the cradle. But the power connector going to the cradle fits also directly on the Clié. In other words, for charging the Clié on the road, you don't have to take the cradle with you or buy a special travelling charger. Just unplug the power supply from the cradle and plug it directly into the Clié. The pictures should show the system pretty clear.
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The Clié cradle is a beauty and has a very small footprint. Unfortunately its a little bit too light. The Clié slides in nearly by itself and snaps into a tiny nose on the cradle, so far so good. But when you want to take it out, the cradle is light enough to stick to the Clié. So either you 'rattle' a bit to get rid of it, or you hold it down on the desk with your other hand. Another strategy is, to press the Clié down a bit first and tilt it to the front so it comes loose from that tiny 'nose'.
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Of course there's the usual hotsync button and a green LED, indicating the Clié is connected and externally powered. Unfortunately the light does not indicate when the battery is full, it's on as long as the device is powered. The Clié comes with a USB cradle. If you need RS-232, you have to order an extra cradle or you can modify the USB cradle with the same trick that worked already for the Palm m505. On the table below you'll find all the signals on the Clié connector.
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Cradle Pin #
from left to right
Signal  name
 Signal description
1
USB_D-
 negative USB data signal
2
USB_D+
 positive USB data signal
3
DTR
 Data terminal ready (5.5V / 0V via 100 kOhm)
4
RXD
 RS-232 RxD signal (input)
5
RTS
 RS-232 RTS signal (output)
6
TXD
 RS-232 TxD signal (output)
7
CTS
 RS-232 CTS signal (input)
8
-
not connected
9
DC_B+
 +5.7 V charge supply input, 500-700mA min.
10
HOTSYNC
 Low signal on this pin starts a hotsync
11
UNREG OUT
 Supply output 3.4V - 4.2V unregulated, 100mA max.
12
CNT
 Accessory detect
13
GND
 Signal and power GROUND
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Most of these signals are self explaining and very similar to the Palm m50x series. The Clié also identifies the hotsync port (USB or RS-232) by a resistor value between pin 12 and GND (pin 13). For USB, the resistor has to have a value of 220 KOhm, for RS-232 it's 47 KOhm. For modifying the USB cradle, it's nice that the RS-232 value is lower since you just can add a resistor in parallel to the existing 220 KOhm one to bring it down to 47 KOhm instead of replacing the tiny part completely. In case you're not familiar with these kind of calculations, 60 KOhm would be the right value to put across the 220 KOhm. But that's a very unusual value, a 62 KOhm resistor is much easier to get and would it work just work fine. 62 KOhm and 220 KOhm result in 48 KOhm which is good enough. Of course you still have to add the serial cable to the right pins and an optional switch to use RS-232 and USB alternately. Now that again is much harder on the Clié cradle, since there's much lesser room. If I ever go for the mod, I'll post it here.
A little unusual is the power output on pin 11. It's not regulated and coming right from the Lithium Ion battery which voltage swings between 3.4 and 4.2V. So any accessories supplied by that pin should be able to handle that. Needless to say, that this pin should also be handled with care. A short to ground might have fatal defects!
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Power supply and power consumption
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Beeing the inventor of the Lithium Ion technology already years ago, you wouldn't expect anything else than a LiIon battery in a Sony PDA. And indeed, the Clié is powered by a relatively large LiIon cell with a capacity of approximately 1000 mAh. That's a considerable bigger cell a Palm m505 comes with (nearly double the capacity). So the 23 gram the Clié is heavier are well invested. The best part is, that the Clié doesn't need necessarily more power than a Palm m505, although there's some more hardware to supply. In fact the Clié has a much wider consumption range than the m505, or in other words, the user can save or waste more energy on the Clié. Without backlight the Clié consumes more than a Palm m505. It has to refresh 4 times the pixels and has some more chips to supply. The idle consumption without backlight is about 55 mA,  which results in the same 17 hours the m505 works with no backlight. With backlight the situation changes dramatically. Just as a reminder, the m505 needs about 85mA with backlight which is fixed to one brightness level. Good 6 hours is an average operation time for the m505 with backlight. The Clié consumption with backlight varies strongly and you can see approximate current values for a few brightness settings on the graphic below:
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Set to the lowest brightness level, the Clié needs only about 70 mA. On that level, the Clié screen is clearly darker than a 505, but especially in the night that's not only saving power, but it's also more comfortable for the eyes. In my subjective opinion (I just guessed with the two devices side by side), the slider position on the above image is the right setting for the Clié to meet the brightness of an m505. Then the Clié consumes the same than his collegue from Palm, but don't forget, its battery has nearly double the capacity. In other words, a Clié on the same brightness setting than an m505 works nearly twice as long. The consumption increases quite linear over the slider range, but IMHO from the 140 mA mark on, the brightness increases much lesser than the consumption. I personally think, using a higher setting than about 2/3 to 3/4 is a pure waste of energy. A thumb rule for the operation time is, to devide the 1000mAh by the current value on the slider scale. All these calculations are disregarding of course any additional power drain for heavy calculations, lots of grafitti action and of course games. But that's true for both units and the idle consumption is the only way to get comparable values.
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I guess a real unique feature of the Clié in the Palm OS world needs some more explanations in the power consumption section: The HOLD mode. Probably introduced and most usefull for the MP3 player, it can be used anytime with any application. Operating that little sliding switch on the left side basically shuts off the screen and locks all buttons. But the processor keeps running, as well as any running application. In that mode, the Clié saves quite some power, after all the screen is - depending on the backlight setting - a big power drain. Because of the HOLD mode, the little green light in the power button makes sense too. It stays on when the Clié is put on HOLD while it was running. As mentioned, basically any application could go on working without the screen and such saving power. Though, right now I can't think of any other application than the MP3 player that could do something useful without the screen. By the way, even the auto-power off timer is working in HOLD mode. If no running application is preventing auto-power off (as the MP3 player does of course), the unit powers off completely as usual. Since the screen is already off, only the little green light goes off then. If an alarm goes off in HOLD mode, the Clié powers on only very shortly and goes back in HOLD mode right after the alarm sound is played. But the green light in the power button stays on until the auto-power off time is over - that's a kind of logical behaviour.
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A standard for PDAs with rechargeable batteries seems to become the inbuilt charger logic. The Clié makes no difference and so it's enough to supply simply a stabilized voltage. But unfortunately, Sony picked the real wierd external voltage of 5.7V for their external power supply. So if you plan to build your own second power supply or a car supply, keep in mind that the usual 5V circuits won't do it. Supplying the Clié with 5V only results in no charge at all when it's on, and a incomplete refill when kept off during the charge period. No good idea.
But the supplied 'wall brick' is a nice one. It's a small, lightweight switched type with an input voltage of 100-240V, so you can use it anywhere in the world. Its output current rating is 800mA, that's about the max. a Clié would consume when it's in use and a relatively empty battery is charged at the same time. As with all LiIon batteries, the charge current is high at the beginning of the charge cycle and tends towards 0 when the battery is full after about 2-3 hours. Because of that non-linear charge current, the cell refills already in the first hour to over 50% of its capacity, provided it was nearly empty.
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The Memory Stick
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Let me first mention, I'm no particular 'fan' of the Memory Stick. Not for any technical reasons, but because Sony 'forced' the Memory Stick into the market in days when more than enough flash card standards were on the market already. And even their urge for content protection would have been satisfied with the SD-Card. Having that said, I'll try to describe the Memory Stick support in the Clié still as objective as possible: It works great! I'm afraid I can't discuss all the goodies here, but let me list the most important ones.
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First of all, Sony gave the Memory Stick 'drive' a true drive LED. Beside the physical slot on top of the Clié, a tiny red light is blinking whenever the Stick is accessed. Since some operations on large Memory Sticks can take a while, the LED is a nice feature. It always shows that there's activity, even if an application doesn't. Another nice advantage over the SD-Card support of the Palm is the direct USB driver I already mentioned in the MP3 section. After installing it on the PC and starting the 'MS Import' application on the Clié, any Memory Stick in the Clié appears like a drive on the PC and files can be transferred with simple drag and drop operations. In other words, the Clié acts like an ordinary USB card reader. And it works with the remarkable speed of about 550 kB/sec. But also internally the Memory Stick works faster than an MMC in a Palm. Ababall for example, a game sized about 600 KB, takes about 7 seconds to load when residing on a Memory Stick. On the Palm m505 it takes nearly 12 seconds to load the same game from an MMC. 
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Actually, Sony implemented anyway some things Palm missed on their m50x series. One of these things is a backup tool. In the Clié a simple, but well working backup application resides in ROM (Flash of course) and works with every Memory Stick. I personally find Palm's backup SD-card policy a bad joke! Only HandEra tops the Clié, supporting even 2 different card standards and offering tons of drivers for serveral peripherial CF cards. But obviously Sony also plans to pack some peripherials in the Memory Stick format. Having slightly more room than in an SD-Card, they can do amazing things. Below you can see two examples what can be done in the Memory Stick format. The camera sticks out with the optics only and the Bluetooth card, recently announced by Sony as the 'infostick', disappears completely in the slot. It contains not less than the memory stick interface, the Bluetooth singal processor, a memory controller, a flash memory, an EEPROM, the RF module and the antenna - amazing. And apparantly Sony plans more interesting products such as GPS modules and fingerprint modules.
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OS 4.1
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My reviews are clearly focused on hardware, OS discussions are not my first choice. But Sony had to tweak the OS quite a bit to support all their extra hardware and such it belongs in that review after all. 
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I already mentioned the highres assist for the screen. Sony had to find a way for all the standard 160x160 applications to work without problems on Clié's 320x320 pixels. The safest way was a simple pixel doubling in both directions by default, unless of course a special 320x320 application is using the high resolution explicitely. That system works very well and I did't find a single application that didn't run on the Clié, even the oldest ones. But especially fonts look quite 'coarse' then and that is a real pity once you saw the fine lined Clié fonts. Found in the Preferences, the Highres Assist tries to trap text and some graphic routines an application calls and replaces the rough, doubled font with a real nice, high resolution font. The nature of such programs is, that they always fail if the application is not using API calls. In that case, any 'bad' application can be excluded from the HighRes Assist. And exactly that system contains a little flaw. Applications that reside on the Memory Stick are copied into the RAM before they can be executed. That prevents their exclusion, because they don't appear in the exclusion list. The better way would have been to include the apps that should be high-res supported. Then these (usually fewer) apps could be left in RAM and selected. As it is now, the only workaround I found is to disable the highres manager completely which is a pity. If someone knows a better way, please don't hesitate to let me know. 
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Another 'Sony special' is the Jog Dial which is also supported directly by the OS 4.1. Together with the extra button below the Jog Dial, alot of standard application can be operated one handed without the stylus. In the launcher you can scroll with the dial through the apps. Once you found let's say the address book, you press the Jog Dial to launch it. The extra button below the wheel is a kind of Escape key which leads back one step. In the address list you can also navigate with the Jog Dial and the two button functions. A nice extra: If you hold the Escape key longer, the menus are opened and the dial allows the selection of any menu entry.
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Then of course there's the audio player app. It's residing in ROM too and controls all the extra audio hardware, surely supported by the OS too. It really enables alot of surprising abilities on the 'good old Palm OS' platform, apparently even multi tasking. The background playing is mostly done by the hardware, but handling the remote in the background too is a matter of the OS. And all that works still while you're playing your favourite game, even hardware challenging ones like Ababall. 'Old' Palm OS programmers know, that the Palm OS kernel always had multitasking features. But only the hotsync application was using them all the time, hotsync always ran its own task. There are rumours about Palm Computing (the old Palm company inventing the PalmPilot), that they didn't want to spent more money in these days for the OS they bought themselves. So they didn't get the full multitasking abilities and goodies we see on the Clié were hidden until now. However Sony did it, the Clié is demonstrating that a Palm OS device is much more powerful than most people would think. 
Only the complaint I had already in the audio section remains true: All Palm sounds are automatically redirected to the headphone if its attached and inexplicable there's no option to prevent that. Then again, you can use the headphone to play a soundy game without annoying the people arround you.
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But there are more applications in ROM supporting the Clié's features. Autorun is a configuration tool to setup a specific application on a Memory Stick to launch automatically when that Stick is inserted. I mentioned already the Backup tool which just has two buttons: Backup and Restore. But thats all you need for saving your work. There is the Import app which works together with the USB driver on the PC and MS Gate which is a little file browser. But Sony also included two apps to support their excellent display. PG Pocket is a picture viewer and with gMovie you can even convert and run little movie clip right out of the box. Both programs are supported by Sony's supplied PC apps take care for the right format conversion. It's just a pity, that both multimedia apps don't really support better file compression. 209.384 Bytes for a 320x320 image is more space than the raw pixels need uncompressed at 16-bit color depth. At 640x640, which is nice to zoom in, it looks even worse. This uncompressed format not only wastes alot of space, but also slows down browsing through an album. The large files just need an unnecessary long time to load from the Memory Stick. I understand, that a 33 MHz Dragonball can't do miracles regarding strong compression algorithms, but I bet a simple run length compression would speed up the app alot already. The time penalty for the decrompression would be never as high as the one for the large file transfers. Alot of room for clever third-party applications, especially since the screen quality is really worth it. 
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This and that
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This section has a good tradition in my reviews, so I kept it, although there's not much more to say this time. Maybe only the hint, that whatever you miss in that review, read it in the m505 review. Even if the Clié has alot of additional features, it's still a Palm OS 4.x color device. Such it has all the usual Palm OS hard- and software stuff, but of course it also deserves the usual complaints. 
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I think since about OS version 3.0, I'm ranting about the decision to cripple the mail abilities. I just can't understand, why you wouldn't want to implement the full functionality of retrieving email on the road via a mobile or a modem. Especially since 90% of the work is already done. All the communication functions are built in, a mail client is there, serial port, IrDa, a dialer, TCP/IP, all there. But no senseful connection to use them together. Right, there're tons of third-party apps meanwhile to overcome that problem. It still would be nice to have it out of the box, safe and ready to work in the ROM. Sony carries on that mysterious tradition and even if they improved alot: No direct, mobile email on the Clié either. And since we are about it, it would be time to pack also a decent web browser in a PDA, especially with a screen like this. Heck, even my Sony mobile phone has an HTML browser build-in and on that 90x60 pixel b&w LCD it's really senseless!
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Then the flap! I guess I have to complain a bit more about the cheap plastic cover on Sony's most expensive PDA. How on earth could something like that happen? Not only that the flap is technically silly since it covers the IrDA port when opened, it's also very cheap made. Hinges for the flap are not really existing, instead the lines where the flap has to bend are more like 'predetermind breaking points' and from what you can read on several forums and newsgroups, they start breaking already. Additionally, the silvery bar that should hold the flap on top of the case is not the best solution either. It comes off easily and with it the whole flap. No, that thing doesn't meet the other Clié standards. Fair enough, in the supply of the Clié you find a second silvery bar without the flap, that's just 'terminating' the top of the case nicely. Then you can use any third-party case which I highly recommend.
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Bottom line - The Clié 760 is a great color PDA. If you once fell in love with that excellent high resolution screen, you hardly want to miss it again. It's sharpness and brilliance is amazing. If you like music in your PDA, the Clié is anyway the only choice in the moment. The player works as well as any other mobile audio player and additionally it can share the valuable memory with PDA apps and data. If you're willing to invest in the white Magic Gate sticks, the space saving ATRAC compression is even a quite unique feature. Of course right now, more and more harddrive based mobile MP3 players are appearing on the market, like Apple's iPod. They have a much better cost-per-song ratio and if you really want to use the Clié for more than a few songs, the Memory Sticks can become a serious cost factor. Sony just introduced the Clié T615C which basically is a 760 without the audio player. It's about 25% thinner and would make partly room in your pocket for an extra MP3 player. But for listening here and then to a few MP3 songs, the 760 is a perfect companion. 
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The support for the Clié specific hardware is very good and Sony did a much better job than Palm with the m505. Picture viewer, movie player, backup tool, external memory handling - everything seems to be more consequently implemented and the user can start right away. Even if an 8 MB Memory Stick is not really a big deal, it's nice to find it in the standard supply and it's already enough to make a complete backup even if the RAM is full. Palm's m505 comes with a plastic dummy in the SD-Card slot instead ... 
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The format of the Clié, even if similar, feels different. The thicker body doesn't feel so nice, but since it's slimmer it's easier to hold for smaller hands than an m505. Old Palm users will search the power button for at least 2 month at the wrong spot and the vertical flap is a pain. If you plan to buy a Clié, order a nice leather case right with it.
The large battery gives the Clié a clear advantage over the m505 regarding the operation time. Under similar, usual conditions (backlight on, same level), the Clié power lasts nearly twice as long. That's great when you're on the road alot. For daily 'office use' the continuous 6 hours of an m505 are more than enough of course.
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With the growing Palm OS community, it becomes more and more difficult to give a recommendation which PDA is the right one and probably, there is no single 'right one' anymore. Price still matters of course, and even if it has a few advantages over a Palm m505, the Clié is considerable more expensive. But the choice is getting wider and the Clié is an excellent addition to the Palm OS world. After all Sony adds some considerable muscles to fight the WinCE world.
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What's my daily PDA you're asking? An m505 - I just can't deny that beautiful form factor and finish :). And it has a real nice feature I'm missing on the Clié: The vibration alarm. But from time to time, I read an ebook on the Clié to pamper my eyes a little bit ... :) ...
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Last updated: February 6th, 2002
Copyright © 1997-2002 by Peter Strobel, all rights reserved.