A Masterpiece of Handheld Multimedia Technology
This Sony handheld multimedia computer from 2003, with a flip open screen, and tiny light up keyboard. The screen can also rotate around. Making it easy to use with its touchscreen interface and stylus. 'have you ever had a dream so real' The housing is all metal. It feels really good in the hand. It feels solid and heavy. On the side here are buttons including a scroll wheel,
with push to select. The camera can rotate from front to back, from selfie to snap. Pressing the camera button brings up the camera app, with noise and static on the screen. I'm going to have to have a closer look at what's going on there. It could be a problem. A memory stick slot for Sony's fullsize Memory Sticks. Here's something notable, a headphone socket! I'm going to be testing some accessories in this video. I may as well start with headphones. By first plugging in a wired
remote control, and then plugging headphones into the remote. I now have a music machine. 'there's just so much left to say' 'I want to get to know you in every kind of way' 'but you're speaking in tounges' 'you take the breath from my lungs' 'It should be shaking if you,' 'but instead it's just what you hear' 'screaming at you' 'but it's like screaming at a wall' 'my words get lost in translation' 'can you feel my frustration' [Music] This Sony CLIÉ has sat unused since I began this channel. Because unfortunately I don't have the ability to read Japanese. Leaving me Lost in Translation. But today this changes. I'm going to reflash the
operating system to English. First though, I need to make a backup of the current flash memory using this handy ROM dump utility. There's nothing like taking a risk :) OK let's go! Initially I am getting an error. But the other two options seem to have worked. Hopefully I've got a good backup. The time has come to flash an English ROM. To do this I'm
going to use a piece of software released a couple of years ago by DmitryGR. One of the great Palm OS modders that we're lucky to have. Simply put the utility and a copy of the English ROM onto a Memory Stick. I then need to hold down the back button and the scroll wheel while pressing the reset hole. This boots the ROM flashing utility directly from the Memory Stick. Dmitry, I don't know how you worked out how to do this, but I thank you for making this. It's now time to flash the ROM and hope for the best. The whole process takes about 20 minutes. After which it's
important to do a hard reset, by holding the power button down and pressing reset. And it's worked! I can finally use my Sony CLIÉ PEG-NX80.V. This device is running the Palm operating system, and it's so packed with software. Sony have really pre-loaded this with a large number of applications. Including lots of multimedia related software. But it doesn't feel bloated. At the time Palm were more focused on the organizer aspects of their devices. Such as contacts and calendars.
But Sony were using Palm OS to make these amazing entertainment focused machines. First let's have a look in the back. Moving the slider opens a section here to reveal a Compact Flash card slot. I have a 256 MB Compact Flash card here. This would have been a large amount of storage at the time. And yep, that seems to work fine. But I'm also keen to try a Microdrive in here. This is a microsized hard drive in a Compact
Flash form factor. These were the only way to have high-capacity card size storage at the time. Putting this into the slot and yes it spins up fine, and sounds like it's working. But the operating system tells me it's unable to recognize the card. I do have a second 4 GB Microdrive here from Hitachi. This one also spins up fine. But it also seems to be recognized by the operating system. There does seem to be a problem with the capacity on this Hitachi drive, being reported as only 1.8 GB though. I tested it fully and it does seem to work fine, and I can
read and write files all the way up to 4 GB. This early version of Palm OS5 seems to have a problem reporting the capacity for these 'huge' sized hard drives. I'm highly amused by the idea of having a spinning hard drive in this PDA. Having a closer look at these two Microdrives, we can see that the Seagate is labeled as 'for embedded use only' and it has an Apple logo on it. This is
a dead giveaway that this drive has been removed from an old iPod. And these are known to not be compatible with many other devices. A topic that I'm going to look into further in a future video. This Sony CLIÉ doesn't have any Wi-Fi connection, and this slot can be used to add Wi-Fi capability. Now I do have a Wi-Fi compact flash card. But when I tried it it didn't work. And that's because there's no Palm OS drivers available for this specific
card. It turns out this card only has drivers available for Windows Mobile. Which is kind of disappointing. I also have this GPS Compact Flash card, that would have been really cool. But again same problem, no drivers available. To get the Wi-Fi working, I was fortunate enough to be lent this. It's an original Sony Wi-Fi Compact Flash card. I would like to thank friend of the channel Pinches from Melbourne for loaning me this Sony Wi-Fi card. And
also the rest of the awesome accessories you're going to see in this video. I just slide the card into the slot and it powers up with a beep. I don't don't even need to add any drivers. Connecting to the internet is straightforward. Though it doesn't seem to have the ability to search for wireless access points. So I just input the network name manually and there we go. I'm now online! Sony have included the Netfront browser into this CLIÉ. Which is now well over 20 years old. So I'm not expecting much. Google is one of the few remaining websites that still accepts
connections from a web browser this old. I can still do search and see images. Unfortunately there are almost no other websites left that can be reached today using this browser. There is another browser that works better on Palm devices. It's a version of Opera, but I was unable to get this running on here. Due to a Java VM problem. There is however one app that still works today
and that's Google Maps. It's so strange to see an almost 20-year-old app still able to go online and be fully functional. Especially a Google based app. Hopefully this continues to work forever. The next optional accessory I want to demonstrate turns out to be one of my favorites. Sony made an
official game controller add-on for CLIÉ. It's designed to attach to just about any model, and it plugs into the bottom connector here. I'm playing Zap 2016, and it's amazing to play this game with a proper controller. After all these years of only ever being able to play this game using the built-in buttons on Palm PDAs. Though I admit that Zap 2016 is one of the few
arcade games that does play really well using the original buttons of just about any Palm OS device. So I want to test some games that would benefit much more from a proper controller. The next game I'm trying is Rayman, a really nice platform game. This controller is so much better for playing Palm games like this. It's like a breath of fresh air. I'm still struggling a bit with this game though. Because I've only ever played it once before, on that recent Nokia with super widescreen video. One day I will play this on a Game Boy I promise.
Exploring further and I did run into a problem with this next game, Jack BBQ. Because this game uses the entire screen. Many devices that run Palm OS use a square screen and many games are made for this aspect ratio. And on this model the controller covers over the part of the screen that's normally not used by a lot of games. I tried connecting the controller with the flip
open, and that was OK. But eventually I settled on playing the game in a tabletop environment. And I managed to get these shots of me awkwardly playing Jack BBQ, a strange and interesting little platform game. I went in search of more games to try using the awesome palmdb.net Palm OS based Community. I found a recently uploaded and preserved game on PalmDB called Magic World. A platform game with absolutely stunning graphics. I'm blown away by how good
this looks. I've been using Palm OS a long time and I had no idea this game even existed. Though even with the game controller, I'm finding it still has very challenging gameplay. 'oh no' I want to move on from platform games and I found this racing game called Micro Quad. The game though also runs in full screen mode, and also in landscape making this almost impossible to find any comfortable position to play with the controller. It seems very similar to Mario Kart. In fact it's basically just a Mario Kart clone. I did eventually find a position to play the game. But it kind of just made me wish I was playing Mario Kart.
Also it's only a demo version and eventually the game takes over and goes into demo mode. OK it's time to have a closer look at the problem with the camera. Unfortunately I suspect this is highly likely to be a hardware problem. But this also gives me an excuse to take this apart and have a look inside. I'll start by taking off this small cover on the side. This reveals the battery which slides out to reveal a nice user replaceable battery. The rest of the screws holding the casing together are slightly more of a problem.
They are all pentalobe screws. But I found the right driver and it's not much of a problem. Now I just have to carefully remove the back, and this turned out to be a bit easier than I originally thought. And there's the main board. There seems to be some white residue on the bottom connector here. I wonder if this has anything to do with liquid Ingress.
Though everything else in here looks fine. There's the Intel XScale CPU running at 200 MHz. Interesting that the chips in here all look rather small in size compared to what I was expecting. Chip die sizes must have been really shrinking at the
time. But to get to the camera I'm going to have to remove this Compact Flash card slot. I just need to be really careful not to cause any damage as I'm doing this. Also I need to very carefully unclip the ribbon cable connector. It's worth going very slowly when opening these connectors. Because any damage to the connector or the ribbon cable and it's game over. Under the Compact Flash card slot there's a second smaller board. Which appears to connect to the
camera's ribbon cables. And these two ribbon cable connectors show why it's worth taking your time with these. One connector uses the levering latch mechanism found elsewhere in this device. But the other uses a slide out latch mechanism. These are also delicate and easy to break if you're not really careful. The other side of this small board shows an area for an unpopulated
chip. I'm also not seeing much that would indicate what could be wrong with this camera. I had a look at the other side of the main board as well, and there's not much extra going on here. It looks like mostly some components for the power supply and a couple of other chips. I also can't tell if this main board has a GPU on it. Apart from the Intel CPU, there's a Samsung chip, which my guess is flash memory. There's an NEC chip, and a Sony chip that could be significant. I don't think the camera fault has been caused by anything like liquid damage. Because looking
inside the rear casing we can see there's white residue everywhere. My guess is this is a magnesium casing. Which is slowly corroded over time just from being in contact with regular moisture in the air. But do let me know in the comments below what you think of all this. Since this is getting really difficult to take apart and I'm not keen to disassemble the camera module, there's not much else I can really do at this point. I'm just to reassemble and hope that this thing still works as it did before. During this process I was unable to find any disassembly instructions online. In fact not even a single photo of the internals. That's possibly because
of how difficult this was to take apart and then put back together. I'm just glad that when I take things apart, I have a video record of me doing it. Which in this case really helped me to do the reassembly. Before the final assembly I'll just plug the battery in and see if it still powers on. And yep, there it goes! sound works and the touchscreen works. OK testing the camera and it's still not working. Though this time instead of getting static, I'm
getting an error message saying it can't detect the camera. That's really odd. I'm sure I plugged everything back in properly. But it's interesting to be getting a different behaviour now. Unfortunately it doesn't help me to fix the camera. So I'm unable to demonstrate it. I do however have one more related accessory to demonstrate. And that's this Memory Stick camera. Yes, Sony made a Memory Stick which included a camera attached to it. I tried it in this Sony CLIÉ, but even when installing the app that came with it, the Memory Stick camera still didn't work. I believe this is probably due to a conflict with the
inbuilt camera application and drivers that are pre-installed in this model. So to demonstrate the Memory Stick camera, I'm going to put it in my grayscale Sony CLIÉ that featured in a previous video. I can now use this to take a photo of the Sony CLIÉ PEG-NX80V. And yes, this camera takes colour photos, even when running on a greyscale Sony CLIÉ. Despite having a faulty camera, I really enjoyed exploring this Sony CLIÉ model. Though since I've had it for so long with its original Japanese system, I've decided to go back to that original Japanese.
Fortunately I have that full backup of the original Japanese operating system. Which with a bit of work in a hex editor (to remove the first 768k) I can restore into the system. After seeing this all in English, I'm confident I'll have an easier time using this. And any apps that I run will continue to be in English. So I won't be so Lost in Translation going forward.
Thank you to everyone who supports the channel, from Patreon to Memberships, and to everyone who just watches and enjoys these videos. Your comments and likes are a big motivation to keep me doing my best and keep this channel going. 2025 is going to be an interesting year. I'm excited to see what will appear on the channel. Until then that's it for now and I'll see you next time. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate and wishing you a great 2025! [Music] 'have you ever woken up from a dream that felt so real, that you didn't know if you were awake or dreaming'
2025-01-02 00:25
