As seen in Japan, Sony is now offering two new handhelds for the US market, sporting a newly redesigned core, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, an integrated camera, native MPEG decoding and more.
Declaring that its CLIE PEG-NX80, released last month, was the "climax of our original vision" for a multimedia handheld, Sony today took the wraps off of the start of their new push to bring the Palm OS to new areas, while completely ignoring the traditional definition of a "PDA".
Sony bills its new CLIE PEG-UX50, announced yesterday in Japan, as a "Pocket Size Network Communicator", and powers its new flagship with its own custom built "Handheld Engine". The "Handheld Engine" is a custom built system-on-a-chip designed and manufactured by Sony. The new integrated chip includes the CPU, 2D graphics engine, Memory Stick Pro interface, camera control, DSP, and other features all in one package, for a 20% savings in space and power. It also supports voltage throttling to scale back power usage and processor speed when not needed. The UX50 is even capable, via its 2D engine and software support, of rendering OpenGL 3D graphics, and the default launcher uses some 3D effects to show it off. Sony claims 16 hours of battery life playing an MP3 file.
That Handheld Engine powers Sony's latest design change, a new landscape-oriented handheld with Twist-and-Rotate design and a larger keyboard than previous models. The new landscape screen is 480 x 320, a 90-degree rotation of Sony's earlier HighRes+ screens. The handwriting area, which supports both Graffiti 2 and Sony's new Decuma system, is on the right side of the screen. The device measures 103 x 87 x 18 mm when closed, and weighs in at 175 grams.
Othe features include an integrated VGA camera and a newly redesigned memory system. The UX50 includes 16 MB of user-accessible RAM for traditional storage and applications, and 16 MB of RAM reserved for the system. It then adds to that 16 MB of Flash ROM that the device will automatically use to backup its data when the battery runs low to avoid data loss, and 29 MB of "unformatted" RAM designed to hold traditional desktop-style files such as MP3 files, MPEG-4 video, and JPEG images. And of course, there is Sony's own Memory Stick Pro slot. Thanks to the Handheld Engine, the UX50 is capable of decoding and playing back native MPEG video files at 30 frames per second. Most recent Palm OS devices are capable of video playback, but usually require some sort of pre-processing on the files.
On the connectivity front, the UX50 packs both Bluetooth and 802.11b (Wi-Fi, WLAN) technologies out of the box, a first for a Palm OS device. To make life easier for roaming users, the UX50 includes a Wi-Fi "sniffer" to quickly detect and configure open access points nearby. While intended for Internet cafes and airports, the potential for war-driving is readily apparent as well. Sony will also be releasing another model, the PEG-UX40, that is identical but lacks the 802.11b radio.
Integrated software includes all of the usual goodies, plus a suite of multimedia applications that should be familiar to most Sony users by now, which have been redesigned to take advantage of the new hardare. The device also includes Internet-oriented applications, including CLIE Mail for email access and a new wide-screen version of the NetFront web browser.
The CLIE PEG-UX50 will be available in September for $699 USD. The PEG-UX40 will be available at the same time for $599 USD.
A high-resolution picture of the UX50 is available on the following page.
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