Sony Clie NX-70V

Despite its clumsy size the NX-70V's speed and screen make it an attractive proposition.

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Price: £450

Manufacturer: Sony

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Verdict

Pros:
Well featured; very fast; great screen.

Cons:
Awkward design and interface.

Overall:
Very fast and with a great screen, the NX-70V could be a superb device if it weren't for its size and clamshell design.

Mark Walsh, Personal Computer World 07 Apr 2003

Last year, Sony brought out the NR-70V Personal Entertainment Organiser, a strange-looking clamshell PDA with a camera and a built-in Qwerty keyboard.

Sadly, it was let down by the poor camera resolution and the subsequent images, as well as its uncomfortable and outdated design.

While the latter has not been remedied by the NX-70V there are plenty of improvements to this multimedia PDA that make it a far more appealing purchase.

For starters, this is Sony's first PDA to use Palm OS 5. This is a far faster OS than its predecessors and supports ARM processors, so Sony has waved goodbye to the 33MHz Dragonball chips of yore and opted for a 200MHz Intel Xscale processor.

The combined result is one of the fastest PDAs on the market; only Palm's Tungsten T can compare.

The camera's resolution has been bumped up to 640 x 480, twice that of the NR-70V, and it now has a 2x digital zoom. Images are therefore much more defined, but we still wouldn't class this feature as anything other than an enjoyable toy.

Thanks to the faster processor it can also handle movie playback, though it is stuttered and at a poor resolution.

On the downside, instead of the superb interface of Palm OS, the default program browser is a rather unsightly and hard-to-access list. The aim is to veer users away from the stylus and into using the jogdial; although we really can't think why.

Thankfully, you can revert to the classic Palm interface, as we did almost immediately. Unlike the previous model, you can minimise the Graffiti area of the screen to make full use of it.

And what a screen it is. Its 320 x 480 resolution is the highest in the PDA market, and follows the tradition of Sony's screens being the clearest and sharpest money can buy.

Flash movie playback is very impressive to watch, and text is incredibly well defined, though again the Tungsten T just pips it.

The built-in Qwerty keyboard is a great idea, as the Graffiti method of entering text is laborious to say the least. However, the buttons are very small, so it is too fiddly to type anything more than a few words without getting frustrated. Also, there are no dedicated number keys.

The NX-70V is a clamshell PDA, in that it folds out to double its normal size so that you can make use of the keyboard. But it's a pretty large PDA in the first place, so opening it up to use the keyboard makes it a clumsy handful.

It's also something that you would be reluctant to use in public, as it would make you an ideal candidate to be mugged, so the camera option already seems less useful.

We would have preferred to have lost the keyboard and slimmed down the device to a more practical size. In its defence, the screen can be swivelled and placed down over the keyboard so that it is less bulky.

The Hold button on the side is an invaluable feature, as there's nothing worse than a PDA's battery running out unintentionally.

The headphone socket is welcome too, although you would expect this on what is touted as a Personal Entertainment Organiser. We did like the included remote and headphones, though, as they were excellent quality and rare on a PDA.

Wireless access is not built in, which is a shame. However, Sony has included a Compact Flash (CF) card slot (though this sticks out the back and further adds to the device's size), as well as the ubiquitous Memory Stick slot.

These allow you to install a wireless local area network CF card and still have the Memory Stick slot free for music and data.

The updates to this multimedia device are genuinely impressive and make it an attractive, if very expensive toy, despite our reservations about its size.

However, be advised that this wouldn't be as attractive a device in a business environment. Hopefully this indicates an update to the whole of Sony's range to OS 5 and Xscale chips.

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