Sony Clié and the Palm Tungsten T

I own both a Sony Clié 665C and a Palm Tungsten T. They are similar in price and features, and this document provides my perspective and opinion about these two handhelds.

For people who don't want to read the whole article, here's the summary: the Tungsten is much superior to the Clié's usability and design.

First, a word about myself. The important thing to consider as you read this comparison is that I value compactness in handhelds above all other considerations, and this evinces itself in my choice of product. In my experience, if the handheld is too large, I won't carry it, it won't get used, and I might as well not own it.

I first started with an Apple Newton, way back in the mid-90's. This thing was a brick, and only the most ardent advocate would carry this thing casually around with her. It was even too big for a purse, much less a back pocket. I used my Newton quite a bit for the first few months that I had it, but eventually, it ended up as a glorified paperweight. It was a uniquely awkward format; to small and with a poor interface to be a replacement for a laptop, and much too large to replace a simple notepad.

At a meeting of the Oregon Java Users group, one day, I met a person who had a Palm III, and became an instant convert. This was a device small enough to be truly useful, and I quickly purchased one. That Palm III was not only the most useful "gadget" I'd ever purchased, but it was sturdy and robust, and lasted three years in my employ, before I upgraded.

My next palm was a Palm V. This may have been the perfect PDA form factor for me. It was slender and elegant, and I long, to this day, to see the shape re-introduced. When I got that Palm, the Palm III went to my wife, who used it for an additional couple of years before it was retired. As far as I know, our III still works. The Palm V was much more twitchy; the power button died quickly on my first one, which I had replaced. When the power button on the second V went out, I gave up and relied on software and the other hard buttons to turn it on and off. The Palm V was also much less resilient to drops than the III. I've never been one to buy protective cases for my palms; if I wanted to lug around a two pound hunk of metal, I'd carry a laptop around with me.

When the Clié T665C was released, I couldn't resist upgrading, although I didn't really have a good excuse to do so. The T665C has a number of neat features, but they aren't really central to what I use PDAs for. I owned the Clié for about eight months before the Tungsten T was released; by this point, I was ready to upgrade, for reasons I'll list below. This brings us up to date, and to the comparison.

Pardon the picture quality; I snapped these off quickly, at night, without a flash.

This is the real reason why I bought the Tungsten T. The Clié is compact, but going to the Clié from the Palm V was painful. The Clié really is just too large for my comfort. The Tungsten also has the famous sliding function, which works amazingly well, and is quite practical. This keeps the size down, for portability, yet doesn't cramp the interface. The Tungsten T wins here easily, although even the T is larger than the Palm V.

The Clié is a more robust piece of hardware. The aluminum is thick, and feels more solid than the T. They're both well constructed, but the Clié is marginally put together better.

The screens are very similar. At maximum brightness, the Clié is crisper than the Tungsten. However, the Clié screen is useless without the back light, whereas the Tungsten is much better. I find I can shut off the back light on the T in bright environments, such as my office, which has overhead fluorescents. The resolutions are the same. The T wins here.

There's no contest; the Tungsten T is much, much faster than the T665C, and this speed difference is very noticeable. The Tungsten wins.

Here's my biggest gripe with the Clié: that stupid memory stick. It galls me that Sony had to go out and invent their own portable memory technology, just so they could scrape additional revenue off of customers. Sony, take note: when considering your hardware versus competitors, the fact that you have your own proprietary memory card format will always be put you at a disadvantage in my eyes. I have two memory sticks, and I'm not impressed with them -- they'll be the last memory sticks I ever buy.

SD cards are cheaper, faster, and smaller. The Tungsten, which has an MMC/SD slot, wins by yards here.

Sony tried to do something clever with the buttons on the Clié that just didn't work. The application buttons are serviceable, but the rocker is impossible to use. It is tiny, hard on the fingers, and not very precise. The buttons on the Tungsten are much more serviceable, and the 4-way rocker with the center button is a superb design. Palm did a really nice job with this, and they should receive accolades for it. Between the rocker and the center button, the Tungsten can be used in "closed" mode quite well, once you get the hang of it.

The Sony has a jog dial, which the Tungsten doesn't. I've seen it lamented that Palm didn't take a page from Sony's book on this, but I never use the jog dial on the Sony, and this is due mostly to how Sony implemented the dial. The dial is disabled, along with all of the other buttons, when the Clié is locked with the "Hold" button. The Hold button is a great idea -- it disables the buttons on the device, keeping it from accidentally being turned on whilst in one's pocket (or purse). It also blanks the screen without turning off the device, which is very useful when one is listening to music. However, as I mentioned, the Hold button also disables the jog dial, and the "Back" button, meaning that you have to un-Hold the device to change the volume or skip a song. This is a terrible design, and renders both the jog dial and the back button effectively useless.

The Tungsten has a single stop/start button on the side, which is programmable. By default, it launches the audio recording tool, which is handy.

Here's another area where Sony did a great job. The Clié has a rigid leather cover flap that sort of folds over the top, protecting the memory card slot, the IR port, and the screen and front buttons. This is a really well designed piece of hardware. The Tungsten, on the other hand, has a clear plastic screen that clips to the front of the device. The plastic clip isn't too bad; it allows for extremely limited use of the device without removing the cover, but the cover isn't attached in any way to the device and so requires two hands to remove -- whereas the Sony's cover flips out of the way like a Star Trek communicator.

There is no doubt, the Tungsten's stylus is far superior to the Clié's. The Tungsten stylus is a large, metal, heavy stylus that expands into a nearly pen-sized shape. Holding the Tungsten's stylus is similar to holding a decent writing instrument. Holding the Clié's stylus is similar to holding a toothpick. The Tungsten stylus could put third party stylus makers out of business.

Both devices play music well. However, Sony has a proprietary audio player, and refuses to release the specifications of their audio chip to third parties, which means that you're stuck with Sony's player. The Tungsten doesn't even come with an audio player, which is too bad. However, you can get third party players for the Tungsten that work (and look) even better than Sony's proprietary player. Aeroplayer is an example, that plays not only MP3 files, but the new standard OGG files as well. Sony's player is limited to MP3 and their proprietary (and practically useless) ATRAC format. The Tungsten wins by a large margin in audio support.

The Clié wins here by sheer fact that the Clié's IR range is superb, whereas the Tungsten's is barely adequate. You won't be using the Tungsten as a remote control replacement, whereas the Clié even comes with remote control software.

The Clié doesn't have recording capabilities, so no comparison can be made here. However, this is another place where the Tungsten shines. I was very pleased to discover that the Tungsten stores its audio files in standard WAV format. This means that you can mount your memory card, browse to the Audio directory, and simply copy the relevant audio file to your desktop, or mail it to someone, or run voice recognition software on it -- with no conversion necessary. This is yet another way where Palm shows that they thought the problem through carefully, and came up with a perfect solution. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but if the Clié did have recording capabilities, I'd expect the audio to be recorded in some Sony priority format.

The recording capabilities of the Tungsten are amazing. It does really well at recording even meeting-room conversations.

The thing that bothers me the most about the Clié is Sony's Not Invented Here attitude. Sony completely and consistently disregards standards. Sony's products are so entrenched in proprietary formats, that they become difficult to use. They have their own audio format, but grudgingly support standards such as MP3. They have their own video format, and refuse to support standard formats like MPEG2 or 4. They have their own picture format, and don't support standards like JPG or PNG. They have their own memory card format, rather than using any of a half dozen other, preexisting standards. This makes the life of the user more difficult, and alienates customers. Even if all other considerations were equal, this alone would give the Tungsten a huge advantage.

What really puts the Tungsten ahead of the Clié are the usability issues. Palm still has the edge when it comes to UI design.

Whereas the Sony jog dial has a terrible design, Palm has taken the standard buttons and extended them in ways that make the device much more useful. Pressing the middle button on the Tungsten while the device is off, for example, causes a clock to open up for a couple of seconds, after which the device shuts itself back off. This is an incredibly useful feature. Hold that button, and the Palm turns itself fully on, and switches to the Application launcher. The same sort of functionality is present on the side start/stop button; pressing it brings one to the audio recorder; holding the button down causes the device to go into record mode, for taking short memos.

Finally, I'm really pleased that Palm has begun standardizing their cradle connection. Many people buy second cradles for home or work, and every time they buy a new Palm, they must buy a new cradle. While this is good revenue for Palm, it is the sort of thing that alienates customers, and I'm glad they've stopped the practice for the moment.