There's an old saying in the high-tech industry: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. But let him license your operating system and he has the foundation for a thriving enterprise that, through selective innovation and cooperative cross-promotion, expands market share for both licensee and licenser.
That, at least, is the thinking at Palm Inc, the company that invented the PalmPilot organizer and its successors. Hoping to emulate the model of Microsoft, which collects billions of dollars from computer companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard that design PCs around Windows, Palm signed licensing agreements with Handspring, IBM, Sony and many others, permitting them to make what amount to Palm clones.
Some of the resulting palmtops add delicious features to the basic Palm programs -- date book, address book, to-do list and memo pad. Sony's new Clie PEG-T415, which arrives in stores this week, is a shining, and shiny, case in point. At less than four-tenths of an inch thick and clad in a black or silver case of sculptured aluminum, it's not only the slimmest palmtop in the world, but also one of the most beautiful.
The T415's thinness isn't designed purely for wow factor, either. It makes keeping the device with you at all times effortless. After all, what's the point of a machine that you start leaving in the drawer just to avoid the lumpy feeling of a sub sandwich in your pocket?
Sony, moreover, is one of the few palmtop companies that puts almost as much thought into the screen cover as into the device itself. On the T415, you can flip open the jet-black cover with a wrist snap, making the whole affair look like the descendant of the Star Trek tricorder (or its ancestor, depending on how seriously you take Star Trek).
Like all of the Sony Clie models, the T415 comes with a handy thumbwheel at its upper left edge. You turn it to highlight items on the screen, and push it in to open them. In conjunction with the Back push button just below it, this wheel lets you operate all of the included programs with one hand, a feature you really appreciate when you're holding a cell phone, umbrella or ice cream cone in the other hand.
Also, like earlier Clie models, the T415 has a Memory Stick slot that can accommodate memory cards (64 megabytes for US$60), a new Sony digital camera that takes 320-by-240-pixel color photos (US$150) or a new audio adapter that plays MP3 music files you've stored on the Memory Stick (US$130). That's all fine, but it's even more amazing that Memory Sticks fit into this thing at all. It must have been quite an engineering coup to squeeze a card slot into a machine that's about as thick as a slice of ham.
A gorgeous, ultrathin palmtop that comes with eight megabytes of memory, a vibration-only alarm mode and version 4.1 of the Palm operating system would have sold just fine. But Sony took the opportunity to introduce two solid new features to its product line.
First, Sony has done something ingenious with the T415's infrared transmitter. Yes, you can use it to beam information, electronic business cards and programs to other organizers, just as you can on any Palm. But when you run Sony's Remote Commander program, which fills the screen with touch buttons, you turn this palmtop into a remote control that can operate about 20 brands of current home-entertainment gear. In tests at an electronics store, my Clie controlled the basic functions of dozens of different televisions, VCRs, amplifiers and DVD players without any trouble (except from the salesclerks).
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