news: SONY Gone from USA, But Not Forgotten

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SONY has pulled out of the USA PDA Market, but certainly has not stepped out
of the PDA business completely. Check out the new CLIE introduced in Japan.
(But WiFi and No Bluetooth? What are these people thinking?)

Sony goes OLED with Japanese CLIE PEG-VZ90 by Larry Garfield

Sony may have discontinued its CLIE line of Palm OS handhelds
internationally, but it is continuing to produce new handhelds for the
Japanese market. Its first new handheld is the CLIE PEG-VZ90, which also
manages to take the crown as the first mainstream handheld to make use of
Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technology for the screen.

Measuring 109 x 87 × 23 mm and weighting a heavy 270 grams, the VZ90 uses
yet another new design. The landscape-oriented screen slides up partially to
reveal a 5-way directional pad and not four but six application buttons.
There is no dedicated writing area, although it's unclear what handwriting
system is used. The device can also apparently function in both landscape
and portrait modes, at least for some applications.
The screen itself is a 16-bit color display measuring 480 x 320 pixels and
utilizing OLED technology. Unlike LCDs, the current standard for mobile
displays, OLED screens do not require a backlight and the individual pixels
are self-luminiescent when current is applied. That makes OLED panels
simpler, cheaper, thinner, lighter, brighter, and more power-efficient than
comparable LCDs. Despite the promise of the technology, OLED displays have
not appeared in number due to the relatively short lifespan of many cells.
Most OLED research in the past few years has been to find ways to extent the
lifespan of OLED cells, and Sony has apparently extended it enough to put it
into a handheld.

As with several of Sony's previous handhelds, the VZ90 runs on Sony's
propreitary Handheld Engine integrated chip. The Handheld Engine includes
automatic processor throttling up to 128 MHz, as well as 64 MB of RAM (40 MB
user-accessible). It also includes 128 MB of ROM, of which 95 MB is
available to the user. The VZ90 includes a Sony Memory Stick slot,
naturally, as well as a Compact Flash Type II slot. The CF II slot supports
storage cards up to 2 GB, and unlike previous models of CLIE the device does
support playing video off of the CF card (assuming the card is fast enough,
which most should be). The device includes 802.11b Wi-Fi support, but no
Bluetooth.

The VZ90 also includes a large Lithium Ion Polymer battery, which Sony rates
at 4 hours of video or 42 hours of audio playback while the screen is
disabled.

Rather than Palm OS 6 "Cobalt", the VZ90 runs Palm OS 5.2.1 "Garnet",
Japanese-edition. Naturally it also includes a host of additional
multimedia-centric applications developed by Sony, including a movie viewer,
audio player, image viewer, and so forth. Web browsing is provided by
NetFront 3.1.

The CLIE PEG-VZ90 is scheduled to be available in Japan on 25 September for
89,800 Yen (roughly $820 USD). No availability outside of Japan is planned.

An additional high-resolution image of the PEG-VZ90 is available at the link
below

SOURCE: InfoSynch
http://www.infosyncworld.com/system/print.php?id=5317
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