Sony announced two new Clie PDAs, the PEG-T400 (8 MB) and the PEG-T600C (16 MB), which became available on December 8th in Japan.
Sony announced two new Clie PDAs, the PEG-T400 (8 MB) and the PEG-T600C (16 MB), which became available on December 8th in Japan.
The PEG-T400 is available in two colors, Satin Silver and Limited Black whereas the PEG-T600C is available in Satin Silver and Royal Blue. Both units are based on the 33 MHz Dragonball VZ processor running Palm OS 4.1J and have USB, infrared and Memory Stick interfaces. The PEG-T400 sports a 16-bit grey scale screen at 320×320 pixels and the PEG-T600C uses a TFT backlit 65,536 color screen at 320×320 pixels. The dimensions for the PEG-T400 are 71.8mm x 118mm x 9.9 mm and weighs 122 grams and the PEG-T600C comes in at 71.8 mm x 118mm x 12.5mm and weighs 138 grams. Both units come with a bundle of software including Xiino (web browser), gMovie, PictureGear Pocket, PhotoStand, Tvscape, Navin’You, MapCutter, CLIE Paint, Documents to Go, World Alarm Clock, CLIE Remote Commander, English/Japanese Dictionary, Sound Utility, Sound Converter, and a few Memory Stick utilities.
Sony also announced several new Memory Stick accessories including a digital camera, the PEGA-MSC1; a GPS unit, the PEGA-MSG1; a wireless telecommunications adapter, the PEGA-CF60, which is a CF card that allows you to connect to the internet; and a music adapter with earphones, the PEGA-SA10, which attaches to the bottom of the PDA to allow you to listen to your music files on your Memory Stick. All items will be available on December 8th.
Go2Mac Japan Bureau Chief Francis Boisvert sums up the new Sony PDAs:
The new Clie’s feature a new form factor, buttons, thickness (9.9 mm B&W, 12.5 mm color), 16MB RAM, better screen resolution, fonts, alarm vibration, plus a lot of new Sony software. It’s funny that Sony is on the Palm platform and not PocketPC with all of their Vaios being Windows. I’m heading over to the Sony Ginza showroom to meet up on some of their companions. I’ll get some better pics and hopefully they’ll have some of the GPS and Cam modules.
I still wish PDA manufacturers (including Palm) would adopt Handera’s drop-down, or invisible graffiti area technology – it would give us the more screen area by eliminating the silly silk-screened handwriting and button area. What a waste of space!
Francis also sends us some first-hand pictures of the new devices straight from Japan:
- PEG-T400 on display [250 pixel] [640 pixel]
- PEG-T600C on display [250] [640]
- PEG-T600C Universal remote software [250] [640]
- PEG-T600C World Clock software [250] [640]
It should be noted that Sony has released the black and white PEG-T415 [US$299] in the United States, but has not released a color equivalent in the new form factor. Judging by the announcements in Japan, we can probably expect a PEG-T615 sometime soon.
