Sony pulls Clie from US market
I know I am late on the post but I did talk abou tit with a lot of
people, buy a pocket pc, they are going to stay for a while
In a surprise announcement, Sony said it will stop selling Clie PDAs in the
US and any other markets outside Japan for the rest of the year while it is
reassessing the market. Needless to say, this is a severe blow for Palm. It
is also symptomatic for the PDA industry's inability to translate the
initial concept of a personal digital assistant into exciting products that
people really want. It's not that Sony didn't try. In its three years in the
Palm OS market, Sony introduced a flurry of some 30 Clies, trying every
which way to ignite consumer interest. Unfortunately, Sony was always long
on style and short on a clear direction. As a result, each Clie seemed to go
off in a different direction, trying this and that, while paying little
attention to the one feature that the sadly shrinking pool of PDA buyers do
seem to care about: communications. To be blunt: the handwriting has been on
the wall. The PDA has been meandering without much direction for years. Most
products are boring and in search of an identity. As a result, cell phone
makers cleverly incorporated PDA features into a new generation of
"smartphones." That most of those assimilated/mimicked features are poorly
implemented and often barely work doesn't matter. After all, phones are
almost free. You pay later via long-term service contracts. This is not what
we had hoped for. Sayonara Sony. You meant well, but you should have
listened better