I like it.

As mentioned a few days ago, I bought the above device at MicroCenter for $299 to replace a Handspring Visor Platinum I dropped one too many times.

It's a neat little box. 320x320 color pixels, 16 MB RAM, 33 MHz Dragonball processor, adjustable backlight, rechargable battery, MemoryStick slot, JogWheel, PalmOS 4.x. It's a silvery plastic box a little bigger than a pack of cards and comes with a gray leather(?) flap to cover the screen and buttons. The flap snaps off the back with a little switch arrangement.

It fits easily in my front pants pocket.

It seems much faster than my Visor even though the CPU is the same speed. My guess is the display is much faster, but it might be a PalmOS issue.

The resolution is very nice. The colors seem true and vibrant and are easily visible at 50% backlight. I generally run it at about 75%.

It comes with a lot of software, including Word and Excel file viewers, a paint program, a movie viewer, etc. Most of this stuff I haven't played with yet.

I installed one of those protector film things on the screen to protect it from scratches, but the moire' was very distracting. Unlike the Visor, the screen on this device seems to be very tolerant of the stylus and doesn't seem anywhere near as easy to scratch.

It took me a while to figure out how to get the information in the various databases from the Visor onto the Clie', but I eventually realized it was just a matter of HotSyncing the Visor, copying over the .db (?) files in the Sony PalmDesktop folder, HotSyncing to the Clie'. It was pretty painless.

One annoying thing about the Visor was it came with DateBook+ and I bought DateBook 4 as an "upgrade". It had lots of nice additional features, but just about every alarm would be duplicated due to DB+ and DB4 being called. I'm hoping that DB5 won't have this problem with the Clie' (since it didn't come with DB+). We'll see.

I don't have any idea about battery life yet.

Sony wants a small fortune for additional power adapters and HotSyncing cables, but that's to be expected I guess. At the moment, I'm just dragging the cables around from work to home.

PalmOS v5 devices from Sony will be out at the end of the month, and they sound pretty nice. But I didn't want to spend more than $300 and those devices are much more expensive. More [link|http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/02/2139228.shtml?tid=100|here] at Slashdot. Follow the links for more info on the new Sony Clie devices.

Even though this may be trailing-edge technology, I'm very happy with my purchase.

Cheers,
Scott.