Re: No more Clie

[Taro Toporific]

Sony to Halt New Clie Pocket Computer Sales in U.S.

DANG... Good bye English support.
And, YIKES, Clie was more than 30% of the PDA market.

[Taro Toporific]

Sony to Halt New Clie Pocket Computer Sales in U.S.

Slashdot finally gets around to discussing the death of the PDA more than a week after Ultra post it here, sheesh. Well, at least the comments are usefull to real in terms of learning how those folks in the Stone Age use their keitai.

Are PDAs Simply Finished?
Posted by CmdrTaco from the postponing-the-inevitable dept. angkor writes
"After Sony's sudden plan to discontinue the Clie and pull out of the American PDA market, many industry observers have increased their speculation about the demise of the PDA...

[Taro Toporific]

Slashdot finally gets around to discussing the death of the PDA more than a week after Ultra post it here.

Actually, to give them credit on this one...they had the orginal story up on the same day. I posted it here before I made my rounds to Slashdot, but it was already up by the time I checked in there.

Speaking of "making the rounds", everywhere--and I mean EVERYWHERE---on the Net is posting the old story about the Todai prof's "Cloak of Invisiblity" todayThe bad writing by the journalists make it hard to tell whether this any improvement over the fakey projector type demostrated last year as in the FG thread circa Feb 2003. : Tokyo Professor Working on Invisibility
Torigaa Fenikkusu 4 121 Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:50 pm


Mail and Guardian :Monday, June 14, 2004, 4:49 "Japanese scientists have turned fantasy into reality by creating an invisibility cloak that makes it possible to see straight through its wearer. He, or she, simply vanishes from view. The garment -- - demonstrated last week at Nextfest, an exhibition of emerging technologies in San Francisco -- is the work of Japanese inventor Susumu Tachi, a professor of computer science and physics at the University of Tokyo. ...blah, blah, blah...

[Taro Toporific]

Slashdot finally gets around to discussing the death of the PDA more than a week after Ultra post it here.

This belongs in the "Another n00b reporter" category. However, it's so right while being soooooo wrong.

brighthand.com / June 17
Why_Sony_Failed_in_US

....The typical Japanese electronics buyer (of cameras, camcorders, PDAs, etc.) reads the manual in order to understand everything they can about their devices. I am told (though I have never seen it myself) that it's not unusual to see people wearing a PDA on a lanyard around their neck in Japan. They love their technology and have no problem spending all the necessary time it takes to learn how to use it well. Americans love technology too but expect it to be powerful AND intuitive, and we don't want to have to read the darn manual....
Sony failed with Clies in the U.S. because its devices had numerous small software controls with cryptic icons, buried settings with vast numbers of mystifying variables to set up things like Wi-Fi, and unnecessarily complicated looking screens. Apparently for the Japanese consumer, a complicated-looking Applications screen suggests that the device is cool and powerful.

http://www.brighthand.com/article/Why_Sony_Failed_in_US

Japanese customers don't read manuals and they ONLY wear keitais on a lanyard (not a PDA). Japanese don't have love for complicated-looking menus; Japanese companies are too boneheaded to design anything else. Sheesh.

That fact is that the Sony Clie line is over-priced, fragile product with dysfunctional cryptic software---often the Worst in the World. I would love to have a Sony Clie but it won't integrate with my heterogeneous environment.

Besides, as GomiGirl says, "PDA is dead...keitai rules."
Sony smartly pulled out of a losing sector they had no business being in to begin with.

[Taro Toporific]

Via Ars Technica July 9, 2004 @ 11:02 AM By Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Toshiba may be leaving the PDA market; Is the PDA dead?.
In early June we learned that Sony was putting the hold on PDA development in all markets outside of Asia. Now it looks like Toshiba is going to back out, too....

[Taro Toporific]

[aquamarine]

HP is where it's at in my opinion. I used to have the HP 4150 for a while before I came to Japan and adored it. When I head home for X-mas I'm going to pick up another one since I can't find jack-all from HP out here in Japanaland, all that I can find are those Clie's (sorry, I absolutly hate the OS, let alone the Japanese OS) and the Sharps which are not much better.

[Mulboyne]

No more in Japan...

Sony's Clie Hits the End of the Road
Sony is bringing an end to its Clie line of PDAs in Japan, the company says this week. The move comes eight months after the company said it would no longer sell new models of PDAs overseas...Sony's exit from the Japanese market will also mean that no competitors are selling Palm OS-based devices locally. What little competition there is in the Japanese PDA market is now between Sharp's Linux-based Zaurus models and Windows-based devices from Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard.