Sony Clié PEG-T625C Review

Overall Rating

The Sony CLIE T-625C is a seriously nifty gadget.

There are a few negatives you might want to bear in mind. For me, they don't detract from the overall impression of the device, but be warned away. The rocker scroll button is a crime. It's tiny and pretty much unusable. The upside is that the jog dial is absolutely amazing (at least as long as you hold the CLIE in your left hand!) and you don't really need the scroll button. The jog dial is the kind of thing you'll wonder how you ever did without once you get used to it. The flip-over cover, however, is a little too fragile for me. I tend to keep my PDA in a rather big pocket at my thigh and it rattles around when I move. On the CLIE, the cover is simply a leather flap the size of the unit that hanges across the top. There is a more rugged case mentioned on the the CLIE site, but so far I can only find it on the American sonystyle.com. The CLIE is pretty much the same size as the Palm m50x, though, which brings some hope of finding a more protective case. For now, I'll just have to keep it in another pocket. Also, I wish I didn't have to buy a separate power supply in order to charge the CLIE without the craddle. At 5.2V and a special connector, I doubt making my own will work. :-)

The Sony CLIE T-625C PDA is a seriously nifty gadget. The high-res screen is excellent (especially when viewing photos) and handles direct-sunlight situations better than most TFT screens I've seen. The unit itself is stylish to say the least, and Sony seems to have found a good balance of screen size and unit size. It's also about half the weight of my old Handpring Visor Deluxe. 16Mb of memory is pretty roomy (with a 5Mb dictionary and a ton of apps, I ate that up pretty quickly, though ;p), but I also happened to have a 16Mb memory stick, which helps.


Lastly, for those of you who care, I've not yet managed to get it work in Linux. Windows support is excellent, especially since Documents to Go is included, but, whereas my Visor was very easy to set up (with gnome-pilot), the CLIE has so far been unresponsive. I'm working on a solution to that one, but since the CLIE is a typical geek toy (and geeks like Linux), I expect support to be either already available somewhere or just around the corner.

This review is copyright Amazon

Members' Comments onAmazon Customer.'s Review

• Dunc. on 8th Dec 2002

  I found the review very helpful, considering I am wanting a pda myself and contemplating the sony T625. In light of the comment made about a protective case, if you visit the site www.expansys.com then you can find that the pda can come with a hard aluminium case which should be helpful.