Sony Clie Dresses Up Palm Pilot as 'Personal Entertainment Organizer'

The biggest problem with Sony's new handheld, the Clie, besides the pretentious name — pronounced clee-ay — is the advertising campaign. Sony is trying to convince the world that the Clie is a magnificent leap in the evolution of the handheld, a fantastic device that pushes the technological edge and does everything but scrub your back in the shower. They even refuse to call it a Personal Digital Assistant, instead referring to the Clie as a Personal Entertainment Organizer. Well, here's the scoop: It's a decent Palm branded by Sony. Kill the heavenly choir.

Small and comfortable to hold, the Clie does have some nice additions to the standard Palm feature set. The most important is a slot for a memory stick. This would be nicer if the Clie would let you use the memory stick as though it were an extension of internal memory, the way PocketPC devices do. Instead it's more of an auxiliary storage device. If you have a video on the stick, to view it you'll first have to copy it to internal memory.

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