The Sony Clié UX50
Posted June 28th, 2007, in Gadgets.
This is a blog post I feel compelled to write, but I’m not entirely sure why. The UX50 kinda seems like that to me - it’s a compelling thing, but it’s ultimately pretty pointless and I don’t nearly have enough to say about it as I thought I would. I’m not even sure what the UX50 represents - is it the end product of unbridled technological fetishism gone wrong? Is it a “convergent” device that almost got it right? Would it be better if it was updated and sold again today? All of these questions I’m unsure about, but I feel it’d be an interesting topic to explore on this blog which is usually full of my opinions on how to make things better. For this one I’m not sure.
To start, the aforementioned UX50 is a Sony Clié brand PalmOS PDA. It came out late 2003 towards the end of Sony’s incredible run of twelve-new-crazy-PDA-concepts-a-month, and really captured the attention of a lot of the PDA community until Sony’s Clié business imploded a few months later and they began their withdrawal. It’s not a typical PDA, though - it doesn’t look like a typical tablet even when in the tablet mode, and it won’t even let you use the display in a portrait orientation. It also subscribed to Sony’s odd half-baked philosophy of the ”Personal Entertainment Organiser“.. which from what I can understand, involved taking PalmOS’s PIM functionality and shoehorning random media-related features on top of it.
If you read the reviews of it four years ago, you’d come to the conclusion that it was a small, well-made device with lots of features but a few functional deficiencies in the screen size and battery life. The Gadgeteer has probably the best review, and they lean towards the negative. The general vibe of the device was that it was a step above normal PDAs, and that it had aspirations to be like a miniature laptop, with basic web and email capabilities that retain a proper keyboard with a streamlined OS.
The Concept
Seeing some parallels here? A few days after I started this article, rumours started swirling about something similar to the UX50 coming out from Palm, and it being some sort of revolution. Of course that turned out to be pretty underwhelming, but all the while I couldn’t help but think that Hawkins’ dream device had already been attempted before, but slightly differently.
You can sorta see what it was going for from the pictures, right? It really is a baby laptop, and while the keyboard is a thumbboard, it’s designed to be used like a laptop, as it forces a widescreen mode, bundles WiFi (at the time a very PC-centric feature) and has facilities for large amounts of external storage (it was one of the first PDAs to support memory stick pro.)
It does let you flip over the screen for use kinda like a Tablet PC, but I don’t think this is very important or useful. The small screen stops it from being useful. That was one of the major things wrong with this PDA and something that stopped me from bothering with it for longer than a few weeks.
Software
But how about the software? This is the major failing of the UX50. Probably the best example of how the UX50 got things wrong can be seen in its web browser software.
The browser experience on the UX50 is pretty awful. The UI, fonts, navigation, speed and renderer are all substandard and would be hard to justify using for any extended period of time. The bundled browser, of which you can see a picture of above, is called Netfront, by that bizarre Japanese company ACCESS who bought PalmSource a while back. It’s the best of all the graphical browsers on the Palm, but it manages to chew up pages pretty bad and doesn’t do anywhere near as good a job at reformatting pages than, say, Opera.
The other software is pretty subpar too. I don’t have much to say about the PalmOS that’s unique, but in a nutshell it’s incredibly old, ugly, limited and dull. All the third party apps and system modifications in the world (you can see some in the OS X theme I tried to install) can’t make it nicer, and while I haven’t evaluated it yet, it looks like it’s a great lesson in how OS can matter above all when you compare it to the exciting OS of the iPhone.
I don’t think it’d have to be this way. The CPU and software engineering (never trust Japanese software!) are pretty poor by modern standards, and simply adopting Opera (like the Foleo!) could improve the browser experience tenfold.
Conclusions
But in the end, I have to conclude that this idea is just broken. While it’s a fun geeky toy, it never really transcends this to be truly useful. It’s awkward to use, the keyboard isn’t good enough to word process on, the battery life isn’t quite good enough, and it’s nowhere near as good as an iPod for media playback simply by physical constraints. But most importantly, the software on it is generally of poor quality. While some apps like Wordsmith provide a great word processor, and others like VeriChat do a good job of making AIM work on the device, it never quite pushes beyond the hardware constraints to be truly good in any of the areas it attempts to conquer. It reminds me of one of my favourite other gadgets, the Microsoft Handheld PC. While these (and also the Foleo) go for the idea of a larger keyboard over pocketability, the UX50 suffers from the same constraints. While they are adequate for some tasks, they’re rarely good enough to justify themselves, and the software consistently lets them down.
What do I think is the future? Not the Foleo, and not a redesigned UX50. The future of this sort of device will be in cheap, portable external keyboards for devices that you’ll always have by your side - like your phone or a PSP.
Epilogue
The UX50 sold on eBay for $AUD285. Veronica and I bought some KFC with the proceeds, and the rest is going to an iPhone.
Comments
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Lindsay Holmwood says:
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:34 amYo! Three things:
- Your feed seems to be broken. I have no Google reader love!
- “never trust Japanese software!” - Ruby is awesome and Japanese. Give it a look sometime. :-)
- I have a Nokia 770 you can play with for a while if you want to do a review.