Sony CLIE PEG-SJ20 Handheld

I've been looking into a laptop for a while now, but as much as they've come down in price, they're still way out of my range. Then one day a thought occurred to me- a handheld! Duh!

Amazingly, something that fits very well into my pocket can do a good portion of the things I wanted from a laptop. As a musician who records a lot of music, the ability to do mobile music recording is one thing that will definitely have to wait for a laptop, but as a playwright/lyricist, the ability to view and edit Word and Excel files, jot down notes and ideas whenever needed, and to access a dictionary, thesaurus and rhyming dictionary wherever I am is very useful. All of those things are very capably done with the SJ20, and for a little over $100 I couldn't find another comparable handheld with those same capabilities. I researched the different PDAs on the market right now, and the reviews all pointed to this one, and though I haven't tried all of the others in its price range, I have to agree that the SJ20 is a great little device.

For me, the addition of the Documents to Go software was a real selling point, for the Word and Excel capabilities. Apparently, this is NOT included on the SJ22 (although you could probably buy the software and add it).

In retrospect, I might have been wise to spend an extra $100 or so and get the SJ33, which has a built-in MP3 player. Initially I thought I wouldn't need that, but I realize that I do like to listen to reference recordings a lot, and sometimes bed tracks while I'm working on lyrics or vocal melodies, and it would have been nice to be able to make MP3s of songs, upload them to a memory stick, and listen to them whenever I needed to on the SJ20. However, the good news is that the SJ20 is compatible with Sony's SA10 (?) MP3 audio adapter, and I've found them to be available in the $75-90 range, so adding that would still be cheaper than the SJ33 is. Yes, it would have been a little better to have the MP3 capability right in the handheld and not have to plug in an additional bulky adapter. But that's my mistake and it's not that big of a deal.

As far as the Memory Sticks, yes they are pretty expensive (and I'm finding necessary to store everything I want to), but I was able to find a 64mb one for sale for $37. That's not too bad, especially compared to what Sony lists them for.

Features like the DateBook and Address logs are pretty standard on any machine, and those are other features I find very useful. My wife and I are pretty disorganized by nature, and also usually very busy with various projects and things to do (and a 9 month old baby!), and in order to keep things on track, we have to always plot out every thing that needs to be done in a given week. This makes that a lot easier, and the alarm functions give us the reminders we need. It's also very useful that you can sync everything up between the SJ20 and your PC. You can add all of your phone # and datebook entries on your PC and have them synched to your SJ20, which is much easier than trying to Graffiti it all in (although I was able pick that up pretty quickly).

There are also some nice versions of games like Scrabble and Monopoly, which my wife and I like to play, and it's a lot easier to have the handheld while lying in bed than to try to keep the board and pieces together with two dogs jumping around. Color would be nice for games and for the paint program, but didn't really justify the extra price for me. The grayscale resolution of the SJ20 is very good, and I find it very readable and visible with the backlight on. The battery lasts a very long time, and recharges quickly after the first time.

The only thing that's gone wrong so far is I uploaded a very high memory game demo to try out, and when I started it up, it froze everything to the point that I couldn't turn anything off or do anything at all. I performed a 'soft reset', which is apparently supposed to keep all of your data, but it didn't. When I started it up again, it was as if I'd just opened the box. So that may be a problem with it. But thankfully (and this is another great thing about these devices), everything could be restored from the PC (phone #s, dates, Word docs, etc.), so in essence, nothing was ever lost.

This is probably more of a review of handhelds in general, as this is my first and I'm just realizing how useful they are, but in terms of an affordable PDA that can do a lot of those things well, I would say that the SJ20 is a very good deal.