Sony's third Palm OS 5 device leaves the clamshell behind but keeps the thumbboard and Bluetooth. But is the overall design as usable as it could be? Larry Garfield is impressed, but not as much as he wants to be.
Not everyone likes Sony's clamshell design, which until now have been Sony's only Palm OS 5 models. That has changed, though, with the release of the CLIE PEG-TG50, a traditional "notepad" style device with Palm OS 5, a thumbboard, and Bluetooth. If that sounds enticing, it should be. The TG50 is a slick piece of hardware, except for some nagging and in some cases long-standing usability issues.
Design
The TG50 is uses a traditional notepad-style form factor. The case itself is mostly brushed aluminum with some plastic. The brushed metal has a very distinctive grain to it on the front bezel and on the flip cover, giving the device a very industrial look. It measures a svelte 7.16 x 12.6 x 1.62 cm, but the extensive use of metal in the case pushes the weight up to 184 grams; not a heavyweight by any means but not the lightest device either. Either way it feels good in the hand.
 | The TG50 cuts out the clamshell, but keeps the keyboard
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The attached flip cover swings open to a fixed 120-degree position and sticks, revealing the usual top-notch Sony screen. The screen is a 320x320 16-bit TFT display, as always. The screen is bright and vivid, although we did notice several evenly spaced bright/dark patches at the bottom of the screen, likely caused by the very bright sidelight.
Below the screen, instead of a Graffiti area, are the application buttons and below them a QWERTY thumbboard. The application buttons are somewhat thin with the icons silk-screened above them, which immediately made us worried, given the problems we had with the buttons on the PEG-T665c. While the application buttons themselves are large enough, and have long and thin dimples in them to make them more stylus-friendly, the rocker switch is still as bad as ever. It is the same design as the buttons, but has a thin, very-squared off strip rising from the middle of it. The raised part of the rocker is so sharp that it is simply painful to use. Bad Sony.
To the left and right of the application buttons are two round and dimpled buttons. Both are dual-function, depending on if they are pressed or pressed-and-held. The left button is the Home button, and if held activates the Menu. That's much nicer than the two-button Home process on the Handspring Treo 270 and Treo 300. The right button activates the Find function if held, but if just pressed calls up an on-screen Graffiti area, much like the on-screen keyboard of traditional Palm OS devices. That gives handwriting fans the option to stick with Graffiti for many tasks if they don't like the thumbboard. The dot buttons do not, unfortunately, turn the device on.
Speaking of which, the thumbboard is the same modified- US QWERTY keyboard as the CLIE NZ-series. The buttons are generally square and made from a hardened plastic that stuck to our fingers just slightly, but not as much as on the CLIE PEG-NX70v. As is typical, the number keys double-up with the top row of characters. There are two different "function" keys, one a Red line and one a Black line. Numbers and most symbols are Black shift, while Red shift is used sparingly for a few extra symbols and commands like Page Up. While in use, the buttons light up orange for night-time use.
The key spacing on the thumbboard is very good, and we were able to type reasonably fast without any practice. The key travel, however, is a bit short. Having the keys so close to the case also makes it more difficult to tell one key from another. A few keys are shifted around, such as Return being rather low and Backspace being on the same row as the M key. There is only one shift key but a dedicated Caps Lock key, whereas we'd prefer two shift keys. The Tab key inserts a tab character rather than functioning as a "next form control" button, as we would prefer, and four well-implemented directional buttons. There is also a Ctrl button that only works on selected keys to call up certain dialogs, such as Battery remaining, Media Info, and Volume. It's not perfect, but it's still the nicest Palm thumbboard we've used. Good Sony.
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