Pros: 16MB, Low price compared to Palm offerings,High Res Screen, Jog Dial
Cons: Battery life could be better,Wish the processor was faster
The Bottom Line: Sony again shows it's leadership as the most innovative Palm OS supplier. This Sony Palm cannot be beat! (except by another Sony product!)
kenfused's Full Review: SONY CLIE T615C/S SILVER 16MB HHLD USB HOTSYNC CR...
To sum it up, I have owned many Palm Handhelds in the past 2 years: Palm IIIx, Palm m505, Handspring Visor, Visor Platinum, Sony Clie N610C, and now the T615! (thank god for Ebay!)
The T615 does what Palm has yet to do, evolve the color screen to a high-resolution 320x320 display, and do it in a small form factor. (more on this later)
First off, the Clie T615 has a very sleek aluminum body. While not quite as thin as the original Palm Vx series, it does include a color screen. And the Sony 320x320 display is 4x the resolution of the standard Palm 160x160 display (do the math!). This makes for MUCH smoother text display. Basically, once you start looking at a color Sony display, you can never go back to the Palm or Handspring.
The T615 has the same basic form factor as the T415, but is a bit thicker. It shares also the same Jog Dial (Sony feature), and the Back button. Both of these are not found on any offerings by Palm or Handspring. Also, they share the same poorly designed "lever"-type switch to toggle up and down the page. I miss the 2 separate buttons found on the mSeries by Palm.
The Clie includes a leather flip cover, which I personally like much better than the side flip style that Palm likes on their mSeries. However, the small clips that hold the cover on the Palm seems somewhat flimsy, and I am worried about the long term stability of this.
The Hotsync cradle is easy to use, in contrast to the brick that the Palm mSeries ships with. One disadvantage is that compared to the Sony N series, the new T615 cradle is required for charging. On the N series you could simply plug the adapter staight into the handheld for charging.
The Clie includes a very very thin stylus, which does take some time to get used to, but you can screw the top off to create a reset button.
Sony includes some great software with the T615. Including the color calculator, and Dataviz Documents to Go (indispensible in my opinion), the Sony also ships with some of their own proprietary apps. Including a paint program, a slideshow program, a picture viewer, and a very cool universal remote program that lets you take advantage of long range IR to control almost any AV component. You can't beam data that far, but you can change the channel of your TV (including non Sony ones)
With the price of the T615 recently changed down to $299, I can't see how Palm will survive this. The Palm m505 is about the same price, and the m515 is $399. The m505 has less memory, and both these units have an inferior screen compared to the Sony one. For $279 you can get the Palm m130, which has less memory, and also an inferior screen.
I don't see any compelling reason to buy a Palm unit right now, unless you are dying to use the MMC/SD format for memory expansion.
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