Complete Visual Guide to Sony CLIÉ (2000-2004)

Cool to see this posted. I've always liked, and now miss PDAs.

The picture marked as NX70V is actually an NR70, which you can tell from the rounded camera, and rounded power button. The NX-70V was square. The NR70 also lacked the compact flash card slot.

I have an NX-70v, and specifically got it for the CF card slot. The slot was only intended to be used with a wifi card that Sony released, but with an OS patch, you could use regular CF cards, which were much cheaper than Memory sticks. So I bought a third party memory stick Wifi card, and used the CF for storage.

I really miss the range of designs and ideas we used to get in the PDA market, there was so much choice 1993-2003 etc. The iPhone rightly changed the thinking on these devices, but it brought a lot of (IMO relatively) boring homogeneous design language + ideas across the industry too.

Maybe it was inevitable the physical design of everything compute becomes a slim slab of relatively featureless glass, I still miss the variety greatly.

I still have my NX80V tucked away... LOVED that device. Went everywhere with me. I still think the folding design with the flip around screen and rotating camera was one of the most flexible devices that I've ever owned. If I recall I had a WiFi card for it too that used the back expansion slot. Even the charge stand they had for it was well thought out and made the device usable while sitting on your desk. I should hunt down a replacement battery for that thing sometime and fire it up. I stopped carrying it when I got my first "modern" Windows Mobile touch screen cell phone.

I had that T425. It was a gorgeous little device with a flip cover lid. You could feel at the time that everything about this era was building to something not quite achieved. Every device was a series of limitations, frustrations, and longing for something better.

I saw the UX50 in a camera shop in Japan (don't remember if it was bic or yodobashi), and I wanted one badly. I ended up with a sigmarion III (which I still have!), probably for the larger screen, but that design was peak mobility for me at the time.

I used one of the later models throughout college. I heard my model (Sony CLIÉ T625C, IIRC) was very popular with doctors. It had a nice aluminum case and leather flip cover, a really solid lug that I used to attach a pocket watch chain, and all day battery life and some nice free games that were way better than snake on the Nokia 5100 series.

For someone with undiagnosed ADHD, it was a lifesaver for keeping track of assignments and due dates, settings alarms, etc.

Even the desktop software was at least decent, particularly compared to horrible experiences like iTunes.

I used a Sony Clié UX50 in 2004. I watched a whole movie on it once, and remember thinking it was incredible to be able to do that on a mobile device that small. I used it during meetings to note appointments and such, and most people were amazed. The main problem was battery life, which IIRC lasted about 60-70 minutes max (for the movie it was actually plugged in).

I still have it! Although I haven't turned it on for a very long time. Not sure what I should do with it now.

Pretty sure I still have my NR70 around here somewhere. I still have a few other PDAs from that era as well. Wonder if I can find my old HP pocket pc that ran Windows CE...

I completely forgot I used to have one of these. I had one of the monochrome models, but not entirely sure which one. I honestly didn't get as much use out of it as I thought I would.

I had the NX60 and stupidly, in the throes of a frustrating move, threw it out to make space. Of all the stuff I tossed, that is the one thing I regret all the time.

I still have my NZ90. The hardware was amazing, the software not so much