This is far from new news, so please forgive me. Midterms just wrapped up for me, so this has been my first chance to sit down and get a post together this week.
Sony has officially announced that it will be ending the Clie line world-wide. About 8 months ago Sony discontinued the Clie line of PDAs in all markets but Japan. Now, Sony has gone the rest of the way and halted further development and production of Clie PDAs in Japan as well. Sony will continue to support Clie handhelds for a few years to come, but will not be developing any new Clie models.
However, a spokesperson for Sony said that they are not necessarily getting out of the PDA business. There is plenty of speculation that Sony will be developing miniature Windows devices that will come close to the size of what we know as a PDA, and these devices would fall under the Vaio line of products. There is also speculation that Sony Ericsson may be working on a PalmOS based smartphone. It’s hard to imagine that happening when Sony has stuck with Symbian for so long in the P series smartphones, but you can never say never.
Regardless, this does officially bring an end to the Clie era of handhelds. You’ve really got to appreciate the amount of innovation Sony brought to the PalmOS market, even if they didn’t always seem to have the customers’ best interests in mind (None of my FlashROM Clies had any ROM updates released).
You can read more about it at palminfocenter.com
[P.S. - I made that buddy icon at the top of this post a couple years ago when I dropped by NR70V and busted the screen. I modified it from some icon about relationships. I thought it was appropriate for this news.]