Despite pulling out of the US and European markets, Sony's CLIE line is still kicking in Japan, and is now kicking with an OLED display.
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.
 | | Sony CLIE PEG-VZ90 |
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 on the following page.
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