Sony CLIE PEG-TG50 Handheld

Few months ago, in the month of June, this year when I was in Seattle due to GGF8 I bought my Clie TG50 from there. Mainly for two reasons – integrated Bluetooth and Palm OS 5 (as I mainly use Apple these days), I was interested. But since then I didn't use that too much until last 4-5 weeks. Now I'm happily using this at regular basis without any such major complain. But still it has got some drawbacks, which I'll discuss later. Basically TG50 is a combination of several elements from other Sony models with some extras. Well, have a look what we got. Now it's time to open the box.

LOOK & FEEL

What you see – aahaa!!! – a slick, shiny, brushed aluminium finish nice PDA with an integrated flip cover, as all handhelds should. The cover is removable, but exposes a large hinge at top if you remove and looks really funny. You will find a hi-res 320 x 320 pixel TFT color screen, a built-in thumb keyboard and integrated Bluetooth for wireless networking. Quite impressive, isn't it???

Screen: The backlit hi-res transflective 320x320 pixel, 65,000-color TFT screen is really brilliant, which gives sharp, crispy output. The only flaw is a slight blue shed at the very bottom. The display shows a very little distortion and uneven lighting. But it doesn't make any big differences. Some people complain that 'the backlight leaves wavy shadows on one edge of the screen and these are quite noticeable when background is white' but, to be honest, the set I have, I didn't find any thing serious with it. In fact, after reading those reviews about the screen when I examined very closely I just noticed a scant blue shed at the very bottom of the screen mainly because the front-light uses 6 point-source white LEDs at the bottom, resulting in slightly uneven illumination in this area. Other than that, the brightness, contrast and color balance of the screen are as good as we have seen on recent Clie models. The only thing, the screen is slightly smaller than other 320x320 PDAs.

Keyboard: The keyboard is really good in quality but less operational as it's too small. The main keys are transparent with backlight, makes it usable in even complete darkness and the good thing is the light goes off after few seconds if you don't hit any key to consume less battery power. The main keyboard is a slightly modified standard PC keyboard type with two extra buttons, one to type numbers and another one for special characters. The main drawback however is that it's a bit difficult to see the alternate characters printed on the metal below the individual key. Those are printed in blue and orange; pretty low contrast and not backlit. The worst thing is many of the international characters aren't shown at all; you just have to experiment with the red Alt key and various letters. There is no help that shows these. Of course, there is no question of touch-typing. The keys are stiff and you need to use a firm touch to type.

Other Controls: There are seven more extra buttons associated with the keyboard, which are the standard Palm OS application launcher buttons, situated at the top of the keyboard area, just below the screen. The left most (the first) one is a round button to access home/menu operations - a single click for the Launcher and a long-hold for the "Menu". Next five rectangle buttons for 'Data Book', 'Address Book', 'Up/Down rocker', 'To Do List' and ' Memo Pad' respectively. This is the factory default setting but you are welcome to customize. Those are still useable though they are small and not separated but the teeny up/down toggle is quite awkward. The next and last round button is to lunch Grafffiti area - a short push for a pop-up Graffiti window and a longer push for "Find". Unfortunately this Graffiti area takes up almost half the display, leaving you only few lines to enter data but you can fairly easily use Graffiti if you want to.

On the left there are four more side-mounted controls, which include the Sony's famous Jog Dial, Back button, an excellent Power/Hold switch – does double duty as a switch that turns off the screen when you hold the button downwards for few seconds but lets the rest of the handheld continue to function to save battery power, for example when you just listening MP3s (yes!!! It has got a built-in MP3 player, I'll talk about this later) and a dedicated 'Record' button at the top (yes, you right again; it has got a built-in voice recorder too) which I don't really like to be there. The position of the button is very disturbing. If you use a carry case, specially a TG50 leather case, to safe guard your loving TG50 the first thing you will do is accidentally press the recording button when you take it out from the case. Sony needs to find a more comfortable ergonomic position for the 'Record' button.

The centre hinge area can be seen with the lid either open or closed, includes small LED indicators for Bluetooth, Charging, Recording and the mic port. The top includes the headphone jack, Memory Stick slot (with another small activity LED), the infrared window and a large LED window proudly displaying the Bluetooth logo which glows with a cool deep blue light while Bluetooth is in use.

HARDWARE

The TG50 runs a 200MHz Intel XScale PXA250 processor and the memory, unfortunately still its 16MB, out of which 11MB are available to the user to store programs and data.

Removable Storage: There is an optional Memory Stick slot, helps those who need more storage space. Many applications can be run directly from the stick. Memory options include support for the faster and higher-capacity Memory Stick Pro media as well.

Sound: There is a speaker located on the back of the device to listen MP3 in case if you don't fancy using headphones. For listening to stereo sound, there is a headphone jack on the top, however neither headphones nor a remote audio controller are supplied. Sound quality is quite adequate, particularly with a good pair of headphones, is excellent.

Voice Recorder: Audio recording uses the built-in mic though in mono mode and the quality is not bad. Perhaps you need (or better) to get a memory stick to use this function.

Battery: Battery life is fairly good for such a powerful PDA. It's powered by a LiIon Poly battery but non-removable, takes about 4-5 hrs to fully charged. I cannot provide any exact data but in normal use you don't need to recharge within 5-6 days. If Bluetooth and/or MP3 Player in constant use with blacklit on, you need to charge the unit frequently.

Stylus: This unit uses the standard Sony stylus, which looks more like a "coffee stirrer". It's a high quality, good length stick but so thin that it isn't comfortable to use for very long and extracted from it's silo from the bottom. Therefore it is not accessible when the handheld is docked in its cradle, and unfortunately (unlike the NX), there's no stylus holder built into the cradle.

Bluetooth

I assume, meanwhile, everybody already knows what a 'Bluetooth' is, so I'm not gonna explain that again here. In brief, Bluetooth is a short-range wireless networking standard used to allow devices to connect together without wires. It's becoming increasingly useful as the Personal Area Network (PAN) concept becomes more prevalent and your TG50 is Bluetooth enable. I use Bluetooth quite frequently; actually I always use Bluetooth to perform HotSync operation. Other area of using Bluetooth are surfing net on your TG50 though it's not really very impressive due to small size screen and sending SMS from your handheld if you have a Bluetooth equipped mobile phone. I didn't try SMS yet but I did use Internet on TG50 using NetFront web browser. It's excellent as far as you can expect from a handheld computer.

SOFTWARE

Because that XScale processor, it needs Palm OS 5. it's fast but I wonder if the TG50 would use Palm OS 5.2, which includes Graffit 2, a new version of Palm's text entry system. Of course, it includes all the usual Palm OS apps, like the Address Book, Date Book, Memo Pad, ToDo List, Calculator etc.; further more, Sony includes their own software for image viewing and editing that runs at high resolution, an MP3 player, AV Remote, movie player which can play MPEG1 and MPEG4 movies, and some nice 3rd party software like Intellisync Lite for syncing to Outlook and the NetFront web browser are on the supplied disk which you can install if you wish.

MP3 Player and Universal AV Remote

TG50 has a built-in MP3 (and ATRAC) player. The unit doesn't come with headphones. The Sony MP3 app offers bass boost, repeat, and background play, so that the music won't stop if you use another application.

Mac Compatibility:

Everybody knows that a PDA is almost useless with out a PC or Laptop. TG50 is fully Windows supported, so I'm not going to discuss that but for the Mac users like me, this is not Mac supported out of the box. It doesn't come with software to HotSync to the Macintosh. You need to free download and install 'Palm Desktop 4.1' and 'iSync_Palm' in order to use with Mac. Synchronise with Apple 'Address Book' didn't make me happy; with some missing fields, it didn't work for me and iSync didn't work properly too. I found 'Palm Desktop' is still a better choice. Only what you have to do is to install 'iSync_Palm' first, then 'Palm Desktop' and use Palm HotSync Manager rather than Apple iSync. The full documentation is available from either Apple or Palm web site (http://www.palmone.com/us/support/macintosh/). To get the ultimate result and flexibility you amy like to buy MissingSync from Mark/Space to sync with a Mac. It costs about $30 and does an exceptional job in Mac OS 9 and X.

SPECIFICATIONS

Size & Weight: 5.0" x 2.8" x 0.63"; 6.2 oz.
Processor: XScale PXA-250 (200MHz); Palm OS 5.0
Memory: 16MB RAM (11MB avail.); 16MB flash ROM
Expansion: Memory Stick (MS PRO-compatible)
Screen: 320x320 pixel; 65k-color; transflective back-lit
Audio: stereo headset jack; rear speaker; mono mic
Power: LiIon Poly (3.7V, 900 mAh)
Connectivity: USB with cradle, MSIO, IrDA, Remote Commander LED