Sony Clie PEG-NR70V

Be the envy of your friends with the Clié PEG-NR70V's great features - it even has a built-in camera.

Price: £415

Manufacturer: Sony

Ratings

Overall rating:

Rate this product

Verdict

Pros:

Great screen
Built-in digital camera

Cons:
Fiddly keypad
Pricey

Overall:
This is a very good PDA that has a wide range of features and an excellent built-in digital camera, although the resolution is limited somewhat. It's a well-built PDA that should make all your mates green with envy if nothing else, but it's also a very useful device in its own right.

Lars-Goran Nilsson, Personal Computer World 23 Oct 2002

The first thing you'll notice about the PEG-NR70V is its clamshell design. This both protects the screen from being damaged and is home to a tiny keypad. The keys are raised, but resemble those on a very small phone keypad, which limits the keyboard's usability for people with larger fingers.

Above the keypad are six buttons, two of which are scroll buttons and four are application launch buttons. Should you wish to use the NR70V as a standard personal digital assistant (PDA) without the keypad, you can swivel the display a full 180 degrees and then fold the PDA flat so all you can see is the screen. Once rotated, the image is automatically flipped so it's always the right way round.

The screen has a native resolution of 320 x 480 capable of 65,536 colours. In most instances you can only use 320 x 320 for the display, as the virtual Graffiti pad or the tap keyboard takes up the rest. This is because Palm OS 4.1 allows the hardware designers to use a virtual data entry field instead of a hardwired one.

Some applications can use the full size of the display, but most are static software such as picture viewers, so you can't input data. The Memory Stick and infrared ports are on the top of the device.

The most interesting feature is the tiny digital camera on a swivel mount so it can be rotated 300 degrees to allow for great flexibility when it comes to taking pictures, no matter which way around you're using the PDA.

The camera is only capable of taking pictures at 320 x 240 resolution. This might not be to everyone's liking but the quality of the images is amazingly good for such a tiny device. The only problem is that you can't hot sync the pictures straight to your hard disk, so you have to transfer them to a Memory Stick before you can move them onto a PC.

Photos are taken simply by pressing a small button on the top left-hand side of the PDA or clicking on the screen in the capture software. The capture button on the side also launches the capture application even if the PDA is switched off.

On the left-hand side are a headphone socket, a jog dial, a back button and a hold key that allows you to lock the keys on the PDA. The stylus clicks into place securely at the bottom right and we had no problems with it dropping out. The stylus is a fairly short metal rod with a bit of plastic in each end, but it's quite sturdy and does the job.

The infrared port has been modified so it is capable of controlling home audio-visual (AV) equipment, with the help of the Clié remote control software. While this is not a new feature in Sony's PDAs, it's very handy if you want to impress your friends.

The Memory Stick slot accepts both normal and Magic Gate Memory Sticks (Magic Gate is designed to store audio files). You get a wired remote control and a pair of basic in-ear headphones too, but sadly no Memory Stick. Sony has provided a USB docking station so you can use the PDA as a portable music device. Transferring music from a PC to the Sony Clié doesn't take long.

On the software front, some of that provided is less useful than others. You get a Word and Excel file viewer, GMovie player and Photostand, which is one of the few applications that make use of the whole screen.

Battery life is quoted at 10 days' use. We were unable to test this fully, but we didn't have to recharge the batteries during our four days of testing and the device was still working well.

This is the first good implementation that we've seen of a digital camera in a PDA, but you don't get any of the wireless connectivity that is available with several other PDAs.

SPECS