An excellent first entry into the Palm arena, the Sony CLIE provides a small device with a real backlight, rechargeable batteries, and an expansion slot. It has 2MB of Flash ROM, 8MB of RAM and comes with an 8MB MemoryStick, Sony’s proprietary memory cards used in laptops, digital cameras, and other electronic devices produced by Sony.
The device is slightly narrower and longer than a Palm V with a much better screen. The main improvement in the screen is that Sony returned to the old style backlight used in PalmPilot models and the Palm III. On these devices the background pixels are lit when the backlight is turned on. In newer Palm and Handspring models, the foreground pixels are lit instead. The inverted backlights are much harder to see than the traditional backlights and it was nice to see Sony recognize that.
The CLIE also has a jogdial on the left side as an additional navigation aide. Unfortunately very few applications have been jogdial-enabled.
The CLIE uses a Lithium Ion rechargeable battery. I prefer a Palm with AAA batteries so I can replace the batteries in emergencies, but many do like the cost effectiveness of a rechargeable unit (not to mention that they are more environmentally friendly).
The CLIE only syncs via USB and only supports Windows desktops out of the box. You can purchase third-party Macintosh desktop support if desired. There is currently no way to sync the CLIE to either UNIX or Amiga.
The other drawback of the CLIE is that the buttons are very small and hard to press unless you use the stylus or have small fingers. This makes it difficult at best to play games on the device. If you aren’t a gamer the buttons are much less of an issue and probably will not be a problem.
All in all, the CLIE is a nice device. Yes, it has some flaws, but I have yet to see a device that doesn’t.