Sony Throws In The Towel On PDA Market

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.akihabaranews.com/news_9240.html">http://www.akihabaranews.com/news_9240.html</a><br /><br /><i>"Well, it seems that the rumours have become reality, and after throwing the towel in Europe and the States, the Japanese giant decided to stop the production of its last Clie models (VZ90 and TH55) in July 2005. Impress has the dirt on this story, and they say that the PSP will fill up the gap. Impress makes it clear at the end of their article that Sony will focus on the PSP and mobile phones so will we have a PDAphone soon in Japan?"</i><br /><br />As far as I am concerned, when they left North America and Europe, that was the end. I don't see much of a future for PDA owners when it comes to these game machines with some PDA functionality either. If you have a full blown PDA now, connected or not, are you really going to "upgrade" to a Sony PSP? I guess those using a PDA almost exclusively as a mobile gaming platform might, but the rest of us? Will those things even have touch screens?

[Scarpad]

I may very well end up getting a PSP but in no way is that to replace my PDA. There's just so much a PPC can do that the PSP cannot. It won't let me convert my DVD's to watch, especially when Sony wants to sell PSP versions of films.

[alabij]

The only reason Sony fails is that they try too hard to be different. They always want to force on consumers their proprietery formats. Not cool.

[popabawa]

The Nintendo DS has a touchscreen (as well as a non-touchscreen), and a fine piece of hardware it is too!

There were some rumours swirling a few weeks ago that Nintendo were in discussions with Palm about some kind of PDA add-on for the DS which would be kinda cool.

I guess the issue is one of cost. The DS and the PSP hardware come cheap because the REAL profit comes from games after the hardware is in our hands.

For a Pocket PC, there's no extra to be made (maybe accessories) so the cost has to be front-loaded into the hardware.

IMHO, that's why the Tapwave Zodiac and Gizmodo will struggle, just too expensive against the dedicated games devices.

[Jonathan1]

To be fair to the PSP the screen on that thing blows the doors off of every PDA on the market. The color, the contrast ratio, and the resolution makes even the best PDA screen look like junk.

[MikeUnwired]

I believe that the Memory Stick killed the Sony Clie in North America. If they had stuck with SD or real CF, they would have done very well.

I think the Sony Clie PEG-UX50 is the best PDA ever built -- except for the short battery life, which they solved with the extended battery -- and Memory Stick.

Sony drove lots of the innovation in PDAs with their Clies -- I don't think that even Windows Mobile Pocket PCs would be as advanced as they are today without Sony's work in the category.

DARN MEMORY STICK!!!!!

[drop]

The only reason Sony fails is that they try too hard to be different. They always want to force on consumers their proprietery formats. Not cool.

Well said! Sony did make fine products. May be the recent year shake ups could change Sony's attitude of "We are better than any competitors. We are even better than our customers." ** Not a quote. Just my impression of Sony.

[surur]

To be fair to the PSP the screen on that thing blows the doors off of every PDA on the market. The color, the contrast ratio, and the resolution makes even the best PDA screen look like junk.

I'll wait for Menneisyys's opinion on this if you dont mind ;-)

Surur

[Jonathan1]

To be fair to the PSP the screen on that thing blows the doors off of every PDA on the market. The color, the contrast ratio, and the resolution makes even the best PDA screen look like junk.

I'll wait for Menneisyys's opinion on this if you dont mind ;-)

Surur

*shrugs* I'm just telling you what I've seen with my own eyes. I think Sony uses their BRIGHT tech on that thing because its REALLY bright and the colors are exceedingly brilliant. Doing a side-by-side cursory comparison it makes my 4700 look like crap. *shrugs* Just my .02

[Menneisyys]

To be fair to the PSP the screen on that thing blows the doors off of every PDA on the market. The color, the contrast ratio, and the resolution makes even the best PDA screen look like junk.

I'll wait for Menneisyys's opinion on this if you dont mind ;-)

Surur

No opinions as yet - I haven't seen the PSP next to a i-Mate Jam and/or a HX4700/PL720 as yet :)

[twalk]

One thing that struck me about Sony's PDAs in 2004: despite basically just selling in Japan only, they still were able to sell roughly 60% (by unit count) of what Dell sold last year.

One conclusion I can draw from that is that Dell isn't doing nearly as well as they want to (obvious). The other is that it's obvious that Sony doesn't see any room in the future for PDAs between micro-pcs, portable game machines, and smartphones, otherwise Sony wouldn't be giving up their still sizeable marketshare. (They may be right, they may be wrong, but I'd guess that they'd have a better chance of being right than wrong.)

[allenalb]

maybe sony knows something about a future pc os (with instant on) that we don't. and they intend on making pocket vaio :)

[Ed@Brighthand]

Sony did a poor job of being a handheld maker. Its initial Clie models were lame. Later, it got more serious and developed some very good models. I'm talking back in the Palm OS 4/T665C days. It was way ahead of what Palm was putting out, and prices were good.

However, Sony spooked many buyers by refreshing its line every couple of months. People were afraid to buy because they new something better was always just around the corner. Also, this meant Sony had to pour way too much money into R&amp;D.

Later, Sony got too aggressive with its designs... and too expensive. The NX80V was a great device, but there just isn't much market for $600 handhelds. And the UX50 wasn't even a good handheld, and cost what a laptop does.

And finally, Sony was a victim of in fighting. The company has been losing money, and the Clie line was cut to save costs.

All I'm trying to say is, don't read too much into this. Handhelds will survive; handheld companies that shoot themselves in the foot won't.

p.s. I posted this once already, but I doubt many of you guys read Palm Infocenter.
.

[Khufu1]

Considering the site I am posting on, maybe this is assumed for the sake of this thread, but it wasn't cost, aggressive product line updates, or the memory stick. It was the Palm OS. That's why I didn't come back. I ditched my Palm VIIx and never looked back.
-Khufu1

[zetsurin]

Even though they are both handheld devices, I think it's odd to even compare them. PSP is designed for games and it will do so very well. I have been playing an imported Japanese one, and I can tell you they rock, and nothing I have seen on a PocketPC comes close, from the screen right down to the layout of the controls. Playing games on a PPC has always felt wrong to me (and I have owned 5 different models so far). I for one will be owning both, so it's a win win for me :)

[thenikjones]

[quote="Ed Hansberry"]

"Well, it seems that the rumours have become reality, and after throwing the towel in Europe and the States, the Japanese giant decided to stop the production of its last Clie models (VZ90 and TH55) in July 2005. Impress has the dirt on this story, and they say that the PSP will fill up the gap. Impress makes it clear at the end of their article that Sony will focus on the PSP and mobile phones so will we have a PDAphone soon in Japan?"

quote]

Maybe Sony is doing the same as Handspring and focussing on the Smartphone market rather than PDA? I bought an SE P800 on eBay as I cut my PDA teeth on Psion machines, and I thought it was OK. I gave up on it as I don't like phones with touchscreens - you need a case, so it gets bulky, so you don't carry it everywhere. The OS itself was fine. Oh, and I hate MemoryStick, esp the DUO size. I'd be interested to see how many Clies they sold compared to P800/P900/P910.

[whydidnt]

Sony didn't do themselves a lot of favors, at least in the US market by making several questionable decisions - proprietary hardware and software API's, not to mention the fact no matter what device they sold it was always just a liiiitttle short on memory.

However, they will be missed from the handheld market. They were innovators when everyone else seemed to be content to crank out the standard handheld rectangle with the same specs as everyone else. (Besides some curves here and there and ounce or two in weight - what was really different between all of the original PPC 2002 devices?) Sony gave us integrated camera's, hi-resolution devices (320 X 480), integrated keyboards, and different form factors to name a few innovations that pushed the market along. I think they did push both Palm and PPC manufacturers to try new things. Competition is always good in the technology market, especially a market with such a small user base to draw from.

We only need to look at the other "big" POS hardware manufacturer to see how Sony's withdrawal affected the market. Palm was on to something good with their Tungsten Line of devices when they had to compete for market share. It seems as soon as Sony left the US market, they immediately dropped the ball on innovative new devices. Let's hope that their lack of innovation doesn't cause complacency in the PPC camp as well.

[Darius Wey]

In my opinion, while the death of the CLIEs may be blamed on the higher prices, the fact that it ran on Palm OS, and the lack of innovation in its latest batch of products, a lot of it is due to the fact that all these events were poorly timed in that Pocket PCs began to deliver greater innovation in all its product. The Pocket PC's surge in popularity killed off the CLIE, which had the potential to be a great product.

While the CLIEs are being phased out globally, there's no reason why they may not make a comeback, whether it be with the same old Palm OS, or the Windows Mobile OS. Sony, themselves, are not sure which path to take in the future, and whether they will be making a return to the PDA market. They're still doing a lot of R&amp;D on all this. I believe in the near future, we may see Sony return with a few surprises up their sleeves, although this is no guarantee. Everything is still being planned, and we won't see any changes being made overnight.

[marconelly]

In my opinion, they are making a smart decision. PSP is the product that is going to be bought by tens of millions people - and then you have game sales of which they collect percentage. Compared to that, PDA market is very niche.

I have it, and while it certainly isn't a PDA replacement (I'm keeping my iPaq 1940 and still love it :), it's an excellent multimedia device, with some amazing 3D graphics capabilities for a handheld (around or just slightly below what PS2 is capable of), and just overall kickass, high quality, incredibly slick looking device. That's not even going into audio playback quality which is again, very admirable, with absolutely no amp hum or noise of any kind (even iPod has this problem). Really, the only thing that sets it back as a media playing device is the lack of internal hard drive, so you have to shell out money for at least 1GB memory stick (around $150) to make some good use of it's media playback capability.

I may very well end up getting a PSP but in no way is that to replace my PDA. There's just so much a PPC can do that the PSP cannot. It won't let me convert my DVD's to watch, especially when Sony wants to sell PSP versions of films.
Not true. Converting DVDs to be played on PSP is as simple as drag and drop. I know, as I have done it, and as someone already said earlier in the thread, the screen on that thing is just unmatched. The colors are very natural, the contrast is great, brightness excelent. Really, compared to it, all the PDA screens look very "synthetic" and even flickery. The PSP screen is just beautiful for any kind of multimedia purpose, much better quality than those dedicated media playback devices made by Creative - and being wide screen makes it ideal for movie watching.

[TomB]

Hey Marc and Jonathan, I got a hands-on yesterday on an import and all I can say is this is one amazing beauty! It is smaller and lighter than it seemed in pictures, but it is still inches longer than what will fit in my pockets. Since I really love my old HP1910's size, I am not sure if I would wind up carrying the PSP around. I would like to hear your views on that.

I think the big news everyone is ignoring is that this is the first instance EVER of a major studio releasing NEW films for mobile video at the same time it releases DVDs at the same price! I haven't bought a SONY product in about ten years because of the proprietary add-ons, but the PSP might make me change my mind. For those who don't think this is big news, I have been trying to do this for five years (http://www.pdafreebie.com)! Also without knowing for sure, I am guessing that with 1.8Gs of H.264 video, this smaller disk MIGHT be able to replace DVDs as UMD TVs start appearing. This may be one reason why SONY is co-releasing titles as both DVDs and UMDs - the picture quality COULD be about the same.

Marc, would you mind being more specific about your PSP film compressions? What did you use - Image Converter 2.1? Also, the screen is 480 x 272 yet all of the info I have seen talks about QVGA for self compressions. Does that mean: the film appears in a small box on the screen; it is stretched fullscreen; it is actually compressed at 480 x 272 but at half framerate and bitrate; or it is or can be compressed at the same resolution of UMDs? The new memory sticks are only affordable at 512MBs so with a bitrate of from 1 to 2 Gigabits per second(?) that means a half to an hour of native res video. Can you try a full res/framerate/bitrate compression from the memory stick and let us know about how it looks? Since I am going to try compressing some tests blind, would you mind posting as much information as you can on the compressions you have done? I am only interested in PSP video playback and might release free PSP compressions based on your feedback. Thanks a million Marc!

[twalk]

In my opinion, while the death of the CLIEs may be blamed on the higher prices, the fact that it ran on Palm OS, and the lack of innovation in its latest batch of products, a lot of it is due to the fact that all these events were poorly timed in that Pocket PCs began to deliver greater innovation in all its product. The Pocket PC's surge in popularity killed off the CLIE, which had the potential to be a great product.

People keep on telling themselves the above (esp PPC advocates), but it pretty much isn't true.

Sony had a solid chunk of the market, selling roughly twice as many PDAs as the PPC darling Dell does right now. Sony was a major, major player. Their average PDA selling price was also one of the industry's highest. Using PalmOS didn't hurt them a bit. When they announced the stopping of production, that's when sales dropped, to roughly 1M units/year less in 2004.

When Sony killed the Clie, they were just bringing out the U50, the Erricson smartphones, and had a lot of work done on the PSP. For Sony, the Clie just didn't have any room at all between those 3, making the killing of it a really easy decision.

PPCs didn't really have a sales surge. It just looked like it because they recently passed up the PalmOS sales totals. The rate of sales increase for PPCs has been reasonably constant for the most part for the last several years, at a small % higher than the PalmOS sales rate. (Those small %s add up after a few years.) When both PDA + smartphone sales are taken into account, PPC + MS smarphone has less than 10% greater sales than all PalmOS devices in 2004.

(PalmOS numbers look warped because in 2004 roughly 700K people that would have previously purchased a PalmOS PDA, instead bought a treo. This splitting of numbers between PDA and smartphone camps is really only useful to device manufactuers. Everyone else just wants to hear how many devices are sold with which OS, which you mostly have to dig around to get.)

Pretty much all the stories about drops in sales in this category or that are very misleading. WM is growing in total unit sales. PalmOS is growing in total unit sales. It's just that neither of them is growing nearly as fast as Symbian and RIM, causing their marketshare percentage to drop.

(ie, all the posts about WM vs PalmOS are pretty dumb. Right now they are both losing out to Symbian in the consumer realm, and losing out to RIM in the business realm. We could easily end up seeing both disappear.)


While the CLIEs are being phased out globally, there's no reason why they may not make a comeback, whether it be with the same old Palm OS, or the Windows Mobile OS. Sony, themselves, are not sure which path to take in the future, and whether they will be making a return to the PDA market. They're still doing a lot of R&amp;D on all this. I believe in the near future, we may see Sony return with a few surprises up their sleeves, although this is no guarantee. Everything is still being planned, and we won't see any changes being made overnight.

The Clie almost certainly won't be brought back.

Sony is mostly an entertainment company. The Clie was the "entertainment PDA". A Clie is much more expensive to make and sell than a PSP, doesn't even have a fraction of the market potential of a smartphone, and doesn't even have close to the profit margin something like a U50 can give. From a purely business standpoint, it would be really, really stupid for them to re-enter the traditional PDA market.

(Why wasn't a Clie smartphone made? Corporate infighting with the Sony-Erricson group, which wanted the Clie group dead.)

Todd.

[marconelly]

Hey Marc and Jonathan, I got a hands-on yesterday on an import and all I can say is this is one amazing beauty! It is smaller and lighter than it seemed in pictures, but it is still inches longer than what will fit in my pockets. Since I really love my old HP1910's size, I am not sure if I would wind up carrying the PSP around. I would like to hear your views on that.
PSP is definitely not as portable as my i1945. No question about it. It's not a device that you can hold in your pants pocket. I hold it in my jacket pocket, and it fits nicely there. What's important to me is that it's bigger size is well justified by the included hardware and especially the screen. Also, it's shape gives it a nice ergonomy which is important for longer game play sessions. I don't mind carrying it around. as I really think it's the best thing to have with you, when you have some time to kill, and it's audio quality is great to boot, so I use it to listen to music at work, etc.

I haven't bought a SONY product in about ten years because of the proprietary add-ons, but the PSP might make me change my mind. For those who don't think this is big news, I have been trying to do this for five years !
Well, this time, except for UMD and Memory Stick, PSP sticks to standards quite a bit. It uses regular JPG, MP3, MPEG4 files, and regular 802.11 WiFi adapter. I don't mind the memory stick at all, as I have their T1 photo Camera, and you can just plug out the stick out of camera, plug it into the PSP and have a nice preview of pictures you've made on a bigger screen :) Also, consider that UMD doesn't quite have a good 'standard' alternative, so you can't fault them for going with that format.


Also without knowing for sure, I am guessing that with 1.8Gs of H.264 video, this smaller disk MIGHT be able to replace DVDs as UMD TVs start appearing. This may be one reason why SONY is co-releasing titles as both DVDs and UMDs - the picture quality COULD be about the same.
I have heard rumors that videos on UMD are stored in 480P format, much like the regular DVDs, the reason being that they plan to release stand alone UMD video players. However, I'm not sure that UMDs can quite match the DVD quality, even with H264. I cannot give the honest opinion on this mostly because I would need same video material playing on the same screen to compare.

What I can tell you is that one example of UMD compressed video that I've seen, has looked really impressive. I'm talking about the CGI intro animation to a game "Ridge Racers". If you have a chance to see it, you'll get a good idea of video playback capabilities of PSP.

Also, it is expected that UMD movies will cost somewhat less than DVDs.

Marc, would you mind being more specific about your PSP film compressions? What did you use - Image Converter 2.1?
Yes, I have used IC2.1, but I mostly use 3GP encoder which I think gives better results.

Also, the screen is 480 x 272 yet all of the info I have seen talks about QVGA for self compressions. Does that mean: the film appears in a small box on the screen; it is stretched fullscreen; it is actually compressed at 480 x 272 but at half framerate and bitrate; or it is or can be compressed at the same resolution of UMDs?
Yes, that's an oddity. Videos can normally only be encoded at 320x240, but the video player on PSP gives you an option to stretch and squeeze that in several formats. When converting 16:9 movies from the DVD, the converter will make you a 320x240 file that is squeezed horizontally, more than it is vertically. so when you are playing it, you just stretch it back horizontally to fill the whole PSP screen, and it looks pretty damn good like that. UMD videos however don't do any upscaling, and are stored either at the native resolution or at 480P and then downsampled in realtime. Again, take a look at Ridge Racers intro for an example.

The new memory sticks are only affordable at 512MBs so with a bitrate of from 1 to 2 Gigabits per second(?) that means a half to an hour of native res video. Can you try a full res/framerate/bitrate compression from the memory stick and let us know about how it looks? Since I am going to try compressing some tests blind, would you mind posting as much information as you can on the compressions you have done? I am only interested in PSP video playback and might release free PSP compressions based on your feedback. Thanks a million Marc!
There's already this 3GP encoder that has tons of different pre-defined compression options, and can be tweaked manually too. With some of the better looking preset options, you can encode a 2h movie at around 600-650MB. I have tested the 768kbps fix rate encoding, and also two different variable bitrate methods, which I actually prefer, and with them you can get even smaller files than fixed bitrate.

A Clie is much more expensive to make and sell than a PSP
Don't be so sure about this. In many ways PSP is more advanced hardware than any PDA Sony has made, or any PDA at the market persiod. It doesn't have touch screen or camera, but it does have screen that's better than any other I've seen, dual-layer optical drive, and a very powerful mobile GPU and media processor. It is well accepted fact that Sony is taking a hit on PSP hardware sold, that they plan to recoup on software sales, and large volume hardware sales once the parts and manufacturing becomes cheaper.

[Darius Wey]

People keep on telling themselves the above (esp PPC advocates), but it pretty much isn't true. Sony had a solid chunk of the market, selling roughly twice as many PDAs as the PPC darling Dell does right now. Sony was a major, major player. Their average PDA selling price was also one of the industry's highest. Using PalmOS didn't hurt them a bit. When they announced the stopping of production, that's when sales dropped, to roughly 1M units/year less in 2004.

Fair point. However, a lot of my comments stem from a conversation I had with a member of the Sony executive. The phasing out of the CLIEs is mainly attributable to the fact that it suffered greatly in this current competitive PDA environment, but this does not mean they will not make a comeback. When I asked about the possibility of a comeback, the person said that it was a possibility. When asked about switching over to Windows Mobile, there wasn't a definite "No" answer. So nothing's certain yet, but give it time, and we'll see how events unfold. In the world of mobile devices, Sony are diverting a lot of their efforts into boosting their MD and portable media players. When the time is right, they'll look back to see what they could do for the CLIE (if it's still a viable option then).


The Clie almost certainly won't be brought back.

Sony is mostly an entertainment company. The Clie was the "entertainment PDA". A Clie is much more expensive to make and sell than a PSP, doesn't even have a fraction of the market potential of a smartphone, and doesn't even have close to the profit margin something like a U50 can give. From a purely business standpoint, it would be really, really stupid for them to re-enter the traditional PDA market.

(Why wasn't a Clie smartphone made? Corporate infighting with the Sony-Erricson group, which wanted the Clie group dead.)

Read above.

[TomB]

Marc, thanks a lot for your post! OK, so lets talk about 3GP_Converter. I assume you are talking about "Transcoding_PSP_Direct" (Click here to view script but NOT with mobile devices!) (http://img168.exs.cx/img168/3540/3gp7zn.gif).

*What exactly did you change / tweak in the script for VBR?
*Are you saying NOT to change the settings for let's say 480x272 at 23.976fps (3-2 removed) but squeeze (distort) your master file to 320x240 at 29.97 and then let PSP stretch to 480x272?
*Have you tried the 1.46Mbs setting?
*3GPP is based on H.263 so I am confussed about why a "3gp converter" is being used. The question here is - does this program actually produce an H.264 compression or is this only H.263?
*Looking at the script, I am seeing AAC audio and not MP3, which I thought was what was being used? Would it be better to insert MP3 for smaller file sizes?
*Have you uploaded any of your tests to a public site?
*Do you think these settings have been dumbed down because of the file sizes or because the memory sticks can't handle the bitrate read speed needed for full res and framerate?
*OFF TOPIC 1 - for a cellphone (H.263 120x96 at 80Kbs) with AMR audio (at 16Kbs), what would you change in this script?
*OFF TOPIC 2 - Do you know of a utility to join several three minute 3GP files without recompression?

[marconelly]

*What exactly did you change / tweak in the script for VBR?
With 0.29 version of 3GPP (http://www.nurs.or.jp/~calcium/3gpp/) the only thing I'm changing in some of the settings is adding a volume boost parameter -vol 250. I use that for some more silent videos.

*Are you saying NOT to change the settings for let's say 480x272 at 23.976fps (3-2 removed) but squeeze (distort) your master file to 320x240 at 29.97 and then let PSP stretch to 480x272?
Let PSP stretch it to 480x272. That's what you have to do for now. PSP unit released in USA may have this video resolution playback more flexible, but with Japanese model at least, you are stuck with several pre-defined choices or resolution, neither of which is full screen PSP resolution. Download the latest 3GPP, it includes two best resolution pre-sets for you to chose (320x240 and 368x208).

*Have you tried the 1.46Mbs setting?
Yes. It looks excelent, but the file size makes it not worth it for longer videos.

*3GPP is based on H.263 so I am confussed about why a "3gp converter" is being used. The question here is - does this program actually produce an H.264 compression or is this only H.263?
I think it is only H263. I think only the UMD videos use H264, but we'll see as soon as some public H264 encoder comes out (Quicktime 7 should be here soon and it will support H264)

*Looking at the script, I am seeing AAC audio and not MP3, which I thought was what was being used? Would it be better to insert MP3 for smaller file sizes?
Honestly, I have no idea if that would work or not.

*Have you uploaded any of your tests to a public site?
No, but for now I'm using usually QB3 VBR setting for real life footage, and QB4 fior animation. It seems to work best and produces reasonable file sizes.

*Do you think these settings have been dumbed down because of the file sizes or because the memory sticks can't handle the bitrate read speed needed for full res and framerate?
I'm pretty sure Memory Stick Pro can easily handle even over 1Mbps, and the file sizes would not be that much bigger with native resolution. I honestly have no idea why they did this with video playback outside of sheer lazyness to support the non-standard video resolution. Hopefully, the ROM update will fix this.

*OFF TOPIC 1 - for a cellphone (H.263 120x96 at 80Kbs) with AMR audio (at 16Kbs), what would you change in this script?

Try changing the command0 line to something like:

Command0=""&lt;%AppPath%>\cores\ffmpeg" -y -i "&lt;%InputFile%>" -title "&lt;%Title%>" -timestamp "&lt;%TimeStamp%>" -bitexact -vcodec xvid -s 120x96 -r 14.985 -b 256 -acodec aac -ac 1 -ar 24000 -ab 16 -f 3gp "&lt;%TemporaryFile%>.3gp""


*OFF TOPIC 2 - Do you know of a utility to join several three minute 3GP files without recompression?
I have no idea if an MPEG4 merger exist.