Sony Clie PEG-T425

Now, bear in mind that before the T425, I owned a Visor Edge.

As soon as you take the T425 out of the box, you cant help but be impressed. This product oozes style. The casing is of a very high quality and the product feels light, but certainly not flimsy. Its all very minimalist and chic. Looks good on the desk.

Now, when you turn the unit on, it goes slightly downhill. The screen is indeed of apparently lower quality than its competitors. The contrast/reflectiveness problems that many have complained about are not terrible - they are comparable to the Visor Edge that I used to own. What really ruins the user experience, for me, is the 'ghosting' effect that is generated when items scroll across the screen. There is a noticable blurring when text/graphics scroll (think the 1989 Gameboy, and you are getting close), which is not conducive to a headache, but it is annoying nonetheless, especially when I have used *older* units than this (eg Palm V and Handspring Visor) that had crisp, clear scrolling LCDs. Needless to say, its fustrating when playing games, and surfing web clippings.

Apparently, this isnt so much of a screen defect as a power saving move on Sonys part. Also, the colour version of this pda (T625C) has an excellent screen - some have said the best colour screen of its type.

Enough of the bad. Onto the good:

The screen (albeit with ghosting) is of double the resolution than on normal pdas. The 320x320 screen is excellent for viewing photos (seriously, you have to see it to believe it - the definition is quite amazing for a device this size) and getting more text on screen.

The sound is absolutely amazing. Sony have engineered a proper sound chip into these PDAs. So instead of the normal bleep-bleep type sounds, its possible to have multi-channel (but mono) melodies. You can load midis and wavs onto the pda to use as alarms, or just to show off (mostly I have been doing the latter).

Sony have packed this PDA full of 3rd party and Sony software. Some of the more useful ones are a picture viewer, a movie viewer, a sound player, and a remote control (the unit has an IrDA port and hence can operate your tv/vcr etc). This is all well and good, but seeing as the unit only has 8mb of RAM (come on Sony, this is a joke...) you arent left with much scope for installing your own software unless you want to delete the preinstalled programs.

Overall, I am pleased with the unit. I cant really rate it any higher or lower than my old Visor Edge, as they both have good and bad points. The Sony unit certainly looks nicer though, and after all, thats why people buy pdas in the first place, right?

It looks very smart and it handles very well. The software supplied is comprehensive, so you will not need to purchase anything else for quite a while.

An excellent buy.