The day has come...

On 22 Feb, SONY announced that No more new Clie and current model(TH55/DK & VZ90) will be discontinued in July 2005.

Support parts and repaire for Clie will be kept in service for 6 years after final lot is shipped out.
User telephone support will be kept in service one more year. And after that VAIO support team will take over Clie support,too.
Download service and Clie Mail service will be kept for a while.

SONY announced that they closes PDA business, but it doesn't mean SONY will not have business for mobile entertainment anymore.

The day has come. Last year, SONY closed oversea Clie business. After SONY released VZ90 in Sep 2004(for Japanese market only), many Japanese thought that VZ90 would be the final model as Clie. But somehow, begining of this month, rumor of "New Clie" came out. But the dream doesn't come true.

However, as SONY comments in officially, they don't give up mobile entertainment. They still have VAIO, PSP. (PSP uses same movie format as Clie VZ90's.)

In Japan, we don't have palm based or PPC based smartphone(because our mobile phone sysytem is PDC different system from GSM and usual CDMA).
So we hope, if SONY says "continue business for mobile entertainement.". New mobile entertainment from SONY will be smartphone which SONY Ericson release.

* But in oversea, Sony Ericson has symbian besed smartphone. So I am not sure if SONY Ericson have palmbased smartphone in future.

* This picture is palm OS 6 "Cobalt" JAPANESE version. Will we have no chance to use this Japanese OS? But OS6 is enhanced for smartphone function, so shall we wait for Sony Ericson version?

CJKOS

To show Japanese Language, J-OS is not the only way to make it.
There are several ways to Japanize, CJKOS is the one of the famous application to localize.

CJKOS can show not only Japanese language, it can show Chinese, Korean language.
(but it cannot show these 3 languages in one screen.)

Just download from the website,
There are screen for setting but for the first-time user, it looks to be complicated.
Of course, it has manual, but I will introduce my treo600 settings to show Japanese as below.

CJKOS can run almost any palm devises.
But for Japanese users, there are 2 poor points.

1:CJKOS can show you any types of Japanese, but you cannot input Kanji with CJKOS software-keyboard. It can supprt inpout Hiragana, Katakata only. (So that is why, no check on Enable CJK Keyboard,)
2:CJKOS pre-installed Japanes fonts looks no good.Thickness of the letter is not same for each letters.

To improve these 2 weak points,
1:You can use other IME application instead of CJKOS's.(e.g. J-OS IME, PoBox, ATOK etc.)
2:You can use other type of Japanese fonts from this website.

As a result, you can read Japanese with your non Japanese version of palm devices.

　　　

New Clie in Feb?

In these days, there are rumor about new Clie in Japan.
Since VZ90 has been released on Sep 2004, many people believe that VZ90 will be final Clie even in Japan.
And UX50,NX80V also discontinue last month.
So some users want to buy final stock of Clie and its accessories in Japan.
But some shop comment that "New Clie will come in Spring".

And some Japanese BBS shows details of New Clie (he may be internally SONY member Ibelieve.)
It should be new generation of TH55 series, but it looks like VAIO series.

Anyway, this is good news for Japanese people.
Wait few more months or within this month.

* This picture is TH55.