Sony CLIE PEG-NX70V: First Impressions
This week, the first of the new Palm OS 5 hardware is appearing, and since we're making sure to validate V9's debugger with all of these devices, I'll also be posting my impressions of them, both as a user and a Palm OS developer.
Today, overnight delivery dropped off our Sony CLIE PEG-NX70V. This is the new high-end Palm OS device, priced at $599 USD. So far, I really like it, but I've got some problems.
I have a big problem with Sony's application suite. They are technically impressive, but the user interface design is a dog's breakfast of hard-to-understand icons and confusing program links. I had a similar problem with the apps on the T615C, especially CLIE Paint, but with the added features of the NX70V, you actually want to use the CLIE apps a lot more. Maybe using little icons makes it easier for them to internationalize the program, but the usibility of a lot of the apps just stinks. I really don't care about a cute brown and grey button if I can't easily tell what its going to do before pressing it. I sure seems to me that Sony is really trying to make a complex Pocket PC-like device, but fitting all that into a Palm OS which has a different philosophy.
VFSMark and the NX70V
I've run the popular VFSMark 1.1 program on my NX70V, and here's the results:
File Create: 114%
File Delete: 63%
File Write: 27%
File Read: 129%
File Seek: 129%
DB Export: 81%
DB Import: 221%
Record Access: 212%
Resource Access: 197%
VFSMark: 133
This shows that the fundamental slot driver isn't much better on this device than on past CLIEs, with slow writes remaining a problem. Reads seemed to work well, as did any operation that had a lot of device-side computation, like database import and reading records and resources out of a file on the memory stick.
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Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
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qwertYAK / frobnovich
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