The humble PDA has come a long way since the early days of Palm Versus Psion and the inexorable march of Microsoft into the Pocket PC arena has made many of the Palm manufacturers sharpen up their act, none more than Sony and their Latest Sony Clie TH55 is living proof.
And sharp it is! the Sony Clie TH55 is a cunning use of the Palm operating system and Sony's own user interface and jog dial control software to provide the best user experience on the inside, while the style and finesses that has made Sony a brand that epitomises gadget cool is equally apparent in the external design of the Clie TH55.
The dark menacing exterior of the Sony Clie TH55 hides a sleek PDA boasting a 320 x 480 pixel display which itself is protected by a flip cover, like most PDA's the Sony Clie TH55 is touch screen driven and comes with a small and slightly fiddly stylus. Apart from driving around the menu driven OS and perhaps using the on screen shortcuts there are 2 handwriting recognition systems for you play with, Graffiti has been around for some while and this version 2 software is now quite mature, there is also the Decuma system which differs in execution if not overall results.
The power inside the Sony Clie TH55 is a "Sony Handheld Engine" microprocessor running the Palm 5.2.1 operating system. The TH55 ships as standard with 32mb of internal SD Ram. In terms of hardware goodies the TH55 is loaded, for a start the key area of PDA connectivity is more than covered with Bluetooth, Wifi 802.11b, IrDA and cabled hot sync so no excuses for not being able to connect to your PC.
The Clie TH55 also has an inbuilt camera which can capture in VGA 640 x 480 at up to 0.3 mega pixels, to be fair this isn't much cop but then its on a par with the vast majority of camera phones on the market today. Now this kind of gadgetry will eat batteries especially the Wifi and Bluetooth luckily Sony have thought of that and boast that the device will run for up to 6 hours on a single charge and will stay operational for up to 15 days without needing to connect up to a power source.
Talking of connecting the Clie TH55, while wireless connectivity is impressive we did feel it was a bit tight not to supply a cradle to sit the Sony in while on your desk, sure we get the cables etc, but you'll have to stump up extra if you want somewhere to perch your PDA.
In terms of software you get all the standard Palm offerings including Security, Date Book, Launcher, HotSync®, Card info, Memopad, To Do List and Address Book, amongst the Sony extras above the Palm OS are the excellent Clie Mail and also Picsel Viewer which allows you to view excel and word documents on the TH55 much like the pocket PC Pocket work or excel do.
Connecting the Clie up to check email was fairly straightforward and the Wifi sniffer software made finding our gateway pretty easy too, after a bit of head scratching we came to the conclusion that HTML within emails was not going to work and resorted to plain text viewing which was fine. Attachments didn't seem to phase the Clie TH55 but some of the bigger spreadsheets and images did leave us scrolling like madmen with the tiny stylus to work out what the image was.
Being the gadget made types we are, it was obviously time to stress the Clie, so using the in built memory stick pro slot and one of our 128mb sticks we pushed the processor with MP3 playback while surfing the web via Wifi which seemed ok until the email decided to sync at the same time resulting in interrupted MP3 playback. Perhaps an unfair test and an unrealistic one but it will at least give you some idea what you can reasonably expect from the Sony Clie TH55.
Overall the TH55 which weighs only 185 grams is a neat package, yes the pocket PC OS is better but the palm OS does a good job and sons overlaid GUI and navigation system does a fair job of making it presentable. If you are after a workhorse perhaps a top end Ipaq might be a better fit but for something portable with good connectivity the Sony Clie TH55 would be hard to beat.
