Gadgetory

the year is 2003 college edition Michael Fisher is splitting his time between acting and whatever that is his daily driver is a Samsung a600 camera phone with a nifty rotating screen and he likes it but every day he walks past his College tech store in the wit of class and a bigger beefier smart device beckons from the window 12 years later he finally gets his hands on one i'm that michael fisher this is the sony Clio NR 70 and this is PocketNow throwback despite its resemblance to the clamshell communicators that were its contemporaries this Klee a was well first of all it wasn't a phone Sony called it a personal entertainment organizer basically a PDA on steroids in a time when smartphones were still in their infancy there was a market for stand-alone personal digital assistants to manage your calendar memos and address book like an electronic version of a pocket planner with this one though sony took a few extra steps it bundled in a feature still new to the public consciousness at the time native mp3 support yeah you had to have a sunny memory stick to store anything substantial but the clea came with a built-in audio player and headphones in the box remember the iPod was less than a year old at this point and only the most cutting-edge people carried mp3 players personally I was a mini disc kind of guy but that's a throwback for another time point is this was a big deal for mobile entertainment and the spinning camera included on the more expensive model made it an even shinier toy but as its sleek aluminum chassis implies the clea was also built for the boardroom and the classroom when closed it had a conservative expensive look in that chunky new millennium style with a predilection for extraneous LEDs and almost as much branding as a turn-of-the-century Windows laptop opening it revealed the full QWERTY keyboard the keys were tiny and placed high on the body but they were fairly responsive and the device was built well enough that it could sit upright on a tabletop if you wanted to hunt and peck with fingers instead of thumbs which ever digit you preferred thumb typing was still faster for most folks using palms graffiti input but for graffiti pros there was a stylus silo'd on the lower right side of the casing and this was 2002 remember when bold design meant more than finding a new way to build a slab-sided rectangle so if you didn't need or want the Clio's keypad you could spin the screen 180 degrees and snap it shut and you'd have a thick but fairly compact 3.8 inch LCD to work with at a pretty high resolution for the period though the backlight is very dim compared to modern handhelds the touchscreen would also respond to fingernail inputs and it offered the same strange half rigid half flexible physical feedback of every resistive digitizer of the period for one-handed use or to make blackberry converts feel at home a jog dial was mounted to the left side with a back key beneath it but on our 12 year old second hand unit here it is less than reliable keep in mind that for all the theoretical capabilities implied by these icons there was no wireless radio on this device the palm software had the capability of dialing into an internet connection but you needed to dock with the included sony cradle wired into your computer to sync and connect and speaking of the software it's the old palm OS 4.1 just like I remember from my old trios it's speedy and zippy even on this 66 megahertz dragonball processor debtless because you're only able to run one app at a time Clee a owners also had access to the palm app collection the biggest around at the time opening the possibility of running everything from video players to remote control apps for the IR port up top but again this was a PDA not a smartphone to do almost any communicating you needed to dock with a PC in retrospect with all those limitations it's easy to see the clay as archaic even for its time and with some of the first true smartphones debuting right around them the more forward-thinking people of the period knew that standalone PDAs like this would soon go the way of affordable gas prices Napster and handsome but in 2003 the CLE a in the window that I drooled over every day was the perfect piece of Pocket tech a beautiful blend of Sony's design prowess with palms software dominance and the ultimate T's for a kid with an appetite for the futuristic but the pocket change of a college student don't want to get off this nostalgia train yet I don't blame you check out our earlier throwback reviews here on YouTube and at pocketnow.com and share your PDA memories in the comments down below next to the like and subscribe buttons use them please until next time this has been michael fisher with pocket now captain to phones on twitter off to listen to more Jimmy Eat World Andrew W K and Bloodhound Gang and other such things thanks for watching we'll see you next time