Great for Students & First time Palm Users!
Written: Jan 07 '04 (Updated Apr 19 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great colour screen, beautiful design, nice jog dial, rechargeable lithium battery, very good price.
Cons: Slim software offering, no Memory Stick, no cradle, no case, retractable stylus, small buttons
The Bottom Line: The Sony Clie TJ-25 is excellent for beginners as its simple, elegant & easy to use. The price is good, but don't expect any fancy frills at this price.
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| kpak73's Full Review: Sony Clie PEG-TJ25 Handheld |
This is the first Palm Pilot I have ever owned. My girlfriend bought it for me for Christmas so I've been "playing" with it for a couple of weeks now. Here are my initial impressions (don't mind the Canadian spelling):
The Beautiful Colour Screen is the first thing that you will notice about this unit. The colour is excellent and the pixels are sharp throughout. If you are viewing JPEGs that weren't taken with a decent camera, then it will show jaggies.
The design of the Clie TJ-25 is very simple and attractive. Silver casing, rounded edges, typical Sony style which means pretty top notch.
My recommendation is that this Clie would be great as a starter Clie for first time users or students. Since I'm a first time user, I find the unit to be fine for me. If you can afford the upgrade to the TJ-35, then I say go for it as the mp3 player could come in handy.
The included software is pretty bare bones. Other than basic utilities such as a viewer, address, to do and memo, you get a few trial version games and other trial version programs such as ebook reader, business calculator and so forth. Frankly, I wish this unit came with Docs to Go; I would have loved to be able to sync my emails with Outlook. A comparable Tungsten E comes included with Docs to Go, so I'm a little disappointed.
So far I'm enjoying Bejeweled and Insaniquarium (both trials). The Intellisync Lite software is good for Syncing Addresses from Outlook or Lotus, I'm thankful for this much. I downloaded Kinoma Viewer from the internet and it is proving to be a good utility for viewing pictures and movies. But you have to buy the related Kinoma Producer to convert images to view on the Viewer... you can't get away from paying it seems. Consequently, I wish Sony bundled a little more software with this unit.
Also, I wish this unit came with a cradle. The two wires, one USB, one adaptor hook up to a connector which plugs into your Clie. Sony is making us pay for the cradle... again... wish this was included. No case either nor memory stick. I wish that Sony included a basic 16MB Memory Stick or something. In case you're wondering... Yes, I lost all of my data once!!
Also, I wish that my girlfriend got me the TJ-35, the mp3 player would be nice especially the sound when I try to watch video clips. As it is, this Clie only makes little beeps and that's it for sound.
The stylus is retractable... sometimes good, sometimes bad. Bad when you are trying to do something and it goes in on you. Good for space savings or if you're 8 years old... I guess. Anyone know where I can find good stylus' for a good price?
The jog dial is easy to use and practical, but I find the adjacent buttons to be a little small and too close together. If you have medium to large hands or fingers, then you'll likely skip on the buttons as they are rather small. I hardly ever use them.
Battery life seems to last about 2-3 days for me. I admit to playing a lot of Bejeweled though which I guess saps the power from the sharp colour screen. I'm not too familiar with the battery life on other Palm Pilots so I have no reference of comparison. Thankfully, the battery is a rechargeable lithium one, so I just plug in the adaptor and it charges itself in about 4 hours... is that long??
No Bluetooth support unfortunately. I read somewhere on Epinions about getting an adaptor overseas that has a Bluetooth antennae on it, but I'll have to look into this later as I do own a wireless Broadband router.
This Clie came at a very good price. I got it as a present so I don't really know the price, maybe around $249 CAN. This is definitely an entry level unit at this price with a great screen, but without any other bells or whistles.
My recommendation is that this Clie would be great as a starter Clie for first time users or students. Since I'm a first time user, I find the unit to be fine for me. If you can afford the upgrade to the TJ-35, then I say go for it as the mp3 player could come in handy.
**UPDATE**
Sony has discontinued making Clies. I would recommend against purchasing one of these and going with the more currect Microsoft OS PDAs.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 179
Recommended for: Beginners - Simple and Easy to Use
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Epinions.com ID:
kpak73
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Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 1 member
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