Sony CLIÉ

I loved this era of tech. I had a Sony CLIÉ PEG-SJ22 and used it a ton for to-do lists and random notes. I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Graffiti and how quick it was to use it. Not as fast as typing, but better than hunting and pecking on an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. I didn't like how the stylus felt on the screen when you wrote so I cut a little piece of a post-it note and put on the area where you'd do the Graffiti strokes. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I was able to save some web articles onto the device. When I was on a lunch break, I'd read through the articles on that little thing. It truly felt like living in the future.

I used one of the later models throughout college. I heard my model (Sony CLIÉ T625C, IIRC) was very popular with doctors. It had a nice aluminum case and leather flip cover, a really solid lug that I used to attach a pocket watch chain, and all day battery life and some nice free games that were way better than snake on the Nokia 5100 series. For someone with undiagnosed ADHD, it was a lifesaver for keeping track of assignments and due dates, settings alarms, etc. Even the desktop software was at least decent, particularly compared to horrible experiences like iTunes.

Cool to see this posted. I've always liked, and now miss PDAs. The picture marked as NX70V is actually an NR70, which you can tell from the rounded camera, and rounded power button. The NX-70V was square. The NR70 also lacked the compact flash card slot. I have an NX-70v, and specifically got it for the CF card slot. The slot was only intended to be used with a wifi card that Sony released, but with an OS patch, you could use regular CF cards, which were much cheaper than Memory sticks. So I bought a third party memory stick Wifi card, and used the CF for storage.

Sony CLIÉ were my choice of Palm devices. Hi-resolution (double), better colour, better screens, better system apps. Crazy hardware design, cyberdecks with so much personality, a far cry from what we have today. And one CLIÉ device that perhaps inspired the iPhone, the TH55, as both Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were fans. I did some preservation of Palm stuff, lost SEGA games https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2019/04/24/recovered-forgott... , app hacking, and more. When browsing the Wayback Machine for old Palm apps, it's so interesting to see pretty much all development stop once the iPhone was released. The original Palm software and user interface design was heavily inspired by the Macintosh. "Piloting Palm" by Andrea Butter & David Pogue is a great read.

I loved the Clié for the built-in camera. Not sure that the quality was much better than the old Sony cameras with built-in floppy disk drives though.

I think there are a lot of smaller companies that can build to standards, and then they either exceed their original vision or things explode to the point where they feel they need to move faster. I love my Apple Watch (on my second one now) and I didn't like wearing watches. Except the Pebble that I bought (I think that I got the first generation Pebble colour, but it's been a while). After that product, things went sideways for Pebble for a lot of reasons. But the initial products were great and the build quality was good (not great, but good). The same applies to the first few generations of the Palm Pilot (and to a lesser degree, the Treo), although I think that the best PalmOS device built was the Clié NX70. With respect to Apple's break even…I suspect that the research they did is going to produce benefits across all of Apple's product lines for the better part of the next decade (part of it already has, with the Apple Watch Double Tap hand gesture, although that is movement detection not camera-based).