The announcement today that Sony is reevaluating its Clie line of PDAs isn’t a complete surprise to me. I see it as an acknowledgement that the Palm OS world has changed. At one time Sony was in a strong leadership position in the Palm OS hardware market. They were releasing more new units than Palm and at a quicker pace. People kept wishing that Palm would release a PDA nearly as innovative as the Clie line. There was even talk of Sony buying up Palm. Will the company that once seemed like a dominant player in the Palm handheld market now may become a footnote?

Despite all their desirable traits, I still had reservations about the direction that Sony was talking their Clie handhelds. When it came time to buy a new PDA Sony always managed to take themselves out of the running.

This is why I think the Sony Clie failed.

For starters, I have never been a fan of the Memory Stick expansion slot. It is proprietary architecture that is present on a wide variety of products from Sony but is extremely rare on any non-Sony product outside of a card reader. Another issue I had with the MS was the “capacity ceiling” at 128MB. It took quite a while for them to finally surpass that barrier with a new version that was incompatible with older Sony MS hardware. Then, there is the price. Sony MS cards typically ran a fair amount more than Compact Flash or Secure Digital media cards of the same capacity. The CF card was available for the TRG Pro and HandEra 330 and a few PPC handhelds while SD was available in nearly every new handheld in the last two years.

Another example of this desire to push a proprietary memory format is evident in the NX line. Sony added a compact flash slot but made took every step to prevent users from using it for anything more than a single, proprietary Wi-Fi card that they sold. This remained the case until an enterprising group developed drivers to allow partial use of the slot for memory.

My next issue with the Clie line was size. The first Clie they ever made just seemed so small. It was to narrow and didn’t fit my hand well. I am sure this was less of a problem with the smaller hands of Sony’s Japanese customers. I am also sure that women and others with smaller hands appreciated it. It is important for a handheld to feel comfortable in your hand. Getting past this on some of their handhelds was difficult. While I realize this is a personal thing, it is still worth mentioning.

Then, there is design of the hardware. Prior to OS 5 (Garnet) Sony stuck to the four standard buttons with an up and down. This is a layout that had appeared on every Palm OS handheld released. They also included their “jog dial” that is present on many of their products. This was an improvement that many people liked for its convenience and simplicity. However, after the release of OS 5 (Garnet), Palm began including a 5 way directional pad on all its new models. Sony never followed suit. Instead it moved the jog dial to the back of the handheld on its new units. After nearly a year with my Tungsten C, I now find the directional pad indispensable in a handheld. Of course PPC users have known the usefulness of the directional pad for years.

The worst example of what I would consider bad design has to be the UX-50. It abandoned the standard button layout entirely. This makes it nearly impossible to play any game that utilizes the directional pad or standard buttons. Not the optimal design for a handheld geared at “entertainment” use.

Shortly after the introduction of OS 5 (GARNET) the 15MB RAM barrier was shattered in favor of a much better 128MB limit. As a result, 32MB and 64MB Palm OS handhelds are very common. The Tapwave Zodiac even has 128MB. Sony’s answer to this increase in memory was to continue to introduce handhelds with 16MB of RAM. But, they did also include a complicated combination of 16MB of memory available for backup, and 29MB of memory available for taking photos and storing music. Even with my 5 years of Palm experience I wouldn’t bother with that complicated mess. I much prefer the simple single location RAM layout of all other handhelds.

Now, before you think I don’t like Sony (gee, where would you get that idea?) I want to point out all of the positives that Sony has brought to the Palm OS world. They really did help to contribute some major features that we all take for granted and drove innovation with in Palm OS handhelds at a time when everyone had given up hope in Palm’s ability to do so.

For starters, we all owe our beautiful color 320x320 and 320x480 displays to Sony. They were the first to introduce color high-resolution and later high-resolution plus virtual graffiti. Without these innovation the PPC platform would be even more popular than it is now. I think that many people would have traded in their Palm OS handheld for a PPC if not for this innovation.

Sony was also early to the game with the integration of a camera into a handheld and the expansion card slot. While it still is not that widespread the PDA camera does owe its origin to Sony and every handheld made has a memory card slot these days. Other leading moves Sony made were the ability to listen to MP3s and voice recording. The ability to use your PDA as an MP3 player greatly improved the usefulness of Palm OS handhelds and voice recording is a handy tool for business users.

Their recent inclusion of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the same handheld is another segment leading move but unfortunately is to little to late.

Sony also included software goodies with their handhelds that Palm has yet to match. MS Import is the most memorable. Palm users still must purchase a third party application to move files to their SD card, something that has been included with Clie handhelds for years.

Overall I think that the reason Sony is re-evaluating their position in the handheld market is due to two things. The first is their uncompromising desire to further proprietary Sony formats at all costs. By refusing to adopt the SD memory card they cost themselves sales. The second is their deviation from the norm in design. Failure to include the basic four buttons and directional pad common to nearly every handheld, Palm or PPC, is also costing them customers. I know that I have seriously considered buying a Sony handheld over the last three years. The N710C narrowly lost out to the HandEra 330 because of the Clie’s MS and the QVGA screen on the HandEra 330. Then last year the Palm Tungsten C beat out the NX line once again because of the MS and because of the memory.

I don’t know if this is the end for the Sony Clie in the US or not. One thing I can say though, if Sony wants to come back they had better seriously rethink their proprietary nature and where it as gotten them.

What do you think about this announcement?

Do you agree or disagree?