In this week's issue, I say farewell to a rather popular line of hardware, catch up with electronic voting and, with major assistance from my readers, further explain a technology conundrum I tried to address last week.
I also have this reminder: My Web chat is at 2 p.m. ET today. I'll be taking questions for at least an hour, possibly more, and as usual, any personal-technology topic will be fair game. And unlike two weeks ago, I don't have a train to catch right afterwards. So if you can't log on to the chat until later in that hour, I'll probably still be able to get to your question.
| | | | __ Subscribe Now __  You are reading the weekly Fast Forward E-letter. Written by Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro, the e-mail version of this feature includes links to all the top personal tech stories from the previous week.
• Click Here for Free Sign-up
| | | | | | |
|
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to say our goodbyes to Sony's Clie line of handhelds, which the company announced last week would be pulled from the U.S. and European markets.
The Clie PEG-TJ37 (Courtesy Sony)
|
This passing was unexpected, at least by me; I had just reviewed Sony's Clie TJ37 handheld, a slim unit that combines a digital camera and a WiFi receiver, found a lot to like and expected that other people would as well. Instead, Sony is throwing in the towel, with vague promises to consider returning to this market. (It will continue selling Clie handhelds in Japan.)
Sony entered the Palm handheld business in the fall of 1999, when it announced that it had licensed the Palm operating system. Its first models were entirely unremarkable, save for their Memory Stick expansion slots and Jog Dial thumb-wheel controls. But starting around the summer of 2001, Sony rolled out a series of handhelds that introduced digital-music playback and high-resolution color screens -- today's standard features -- to the Palm market.
Here's my review of two of those early Clie models, the S320 and the N610.
I liked the N610 enough to buy one myself in late 2001 -- several weeks before Sony discontinued it and replaced it with the more compact T615. (I'm still carrying around that N610, now badly scuffed; it's not long for this world, given the way its battery holds a charge so poorly these days.)
Throughout 2002, Sony delivered more firsts: the NR70 I reviewed that spring included a digital camera and a slick, hinged screen and offered the unusual option of entering text either with a miniaturized keyboard or by writing on the screen using the standard Graffiti handwriting-recognition software.
(That review apparently didn't go over too well with Sony; one publicist for the company declared the article a "hatchet job" and refused to provide review units.)
It would be no exaggeration to say that Sony had turned itself into Palm's hardware R&D lab. But starting in late 2002, Palm began to catch up to Sony, adding high-res color screens and MP3 compatibility while dropping prices; meanwhile, Sony, even as it continued to innovate, adding WiFi wireless networking to its higher-end models, began to pay less attention to the cheaper end of the market. For example, it never came out with a handheld as cheap as Palm's $99 Zire. Sony also never introduced a Palm OS smartphone; its Sony Ericsson subsidiary has instead adopted a competing operating system, the Symbian OS.
