Sony's crammed everything it could think of into the NZ90. Will Palm aficionados bite on this expensive and expansive unit?
Without a doubt, the largest portion of Palm's market share is in the budget space. Recent Gartner figures suggest that the current market dominance of Palms is almost entirely due to the simple budget Zire PDA, which sells locally for AU$239.
Sony's CLIE PEGNZ90G takes the entirely opposite approach; high price, huge feature list. For the sake of simplicity, and because it's an unnaturally ugly name, we'll refer to it as the NZ90 from hereon in.
In order to be able to slip an NZ90 into your pants pocket, you'll need unnaturally large trousers and around AU$1699 to spare. That puts it firmly up against the best Pocket PC devices, and for that sort of money, it really needs to deliver the goods. In size terms, it's certainly there; at just under 300g and 75x141x22.2mm it's quite a bulky PDA.
Powering the NZ90 is a 200MHz Intel PXA 250 processor; you can't currently buy a faster Palm-based processor. The NZ90 runs Palm OS 5, putting it up against the somewhat cheaper Tungsten in the 'running the latest Palm OS' stakes. The screen is a very easy on the eye 320x480 resolution LCD, and as has been the case with its most recent CLIEs, the Graffiti area can be minimised with little fuss. Sony's borrowed an idea from the NR70VG, as the screen on the NZ90 can be flipped and twisted in the same way, moving effortlessly between flip-top and tablet operation. If onscreen squiggling isn't your thing, the NZ90 also comes with a limited keyboard that can only be accessed in flip-top mode. About the only part of the inbuilt hardware we weren't terribly impressed with was the onboard memory, a paltry 16MB, of which only 11MB is available. This can be increased via the use of Sony's Memory Stick, but it would be nice to have more to play with out of the box, especially given the NZ90's emphasis on multimedia applications. The onboard memory also brings up another limitation, which we'll get to later.
There are two specific pieces of hardware that ship with the NZ90 which concern us. The first is the stylus, which works quite well, but is extremely tiny and often doesn't fit into its socket very well. As a result, during our testing period, we lost sight of the stylus on more than one occasion. The other bit of sometimes-dodgy hardware is the PDA dock. The dock for the NZ90 is an attractive looking lightweight plastic affair that neatly integrates USB connectivity to PC or printer, a VGA output port -- very nifty indeed -- and a very simple leaning support. Our only concern with it is that the NZ90 doesn't always neatly sit onto it. The connection port on the PDA itself hides behind a rubber panel, and getting the CLIE to sit nicely on the data port can be something of a chore.
Without a doubt, the main hook for the NZ90 is the integrated 2 megapixel CCD camera that sits at the top left hand side of the unit. It has a shutter, a variety of light settings, and in our testing it took some solid but unspectacular pictures -- essentially everything you'd expect from a simple 2 megapixel camera. The camera is capable of capturing video, and it's here that the memory-stick reliance rears its ugly head. Video capture can only be done to memory stick; there's no way to record to the 11MB of available onboard memory, even if you wanted to. It'd be nice at the price of the NZ90 if at least a small memory stick were included; as it is if you want video you'll need to shell out extra for memory just to make it work.
Continuing the multimedia theme, the NZ90 is also capable of music playback and voice dictation. Voice can be recorded direct to the unit, but like video, there's no way to import music directly to the NZ90; it must be memory-stick based.
Sony's gone all out with the supporting software for the NZ90, which ranges from a Flash player, TV remote control, photo stand software and even a relatively addictive version of Bejewelled. If you want your PDA to be more than just a mobile calendar, the NZ90 comes fully loaded. Being a Palm, you're unlikely to go without third party applications for all that long, either.
The NZ90 comes Bluetooth equipped out of the box, and there's also the option to purchase an add-on WiFi card to enhance the wireless connectivity of the system. It'd be nice, however, if you could make the choice for WiFi over Bluetooth. As it is, Bluetooth devices are still thin on the ground, and the case for WiFi with devices like this is quite strong. Moreover, the WiFi card will cost you a whopping AU$320 on top of the expected RRP of AU$1699. That combination price makes the NZ90 the single most expensive PDA in the current market, and we're not sure that's a good selling point.
The NZ90 is the current Ferrari of the PDA circuit; it's got a lot of grunt, it can do a lot of things, but we can't help but see it as more of a status symbol than efficient use of your money. Of course, if you're using someone else's money, that's an entirely different value proposition. If that describes you, can you pick us up an NZ90 while you're out shopping?
Sony CLIE PEGNZ90G
Company: Sony Australia
Price: AU$1699
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 137 669
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