The Clie series of PDAs will no longer be sold by Sony in the U.S. market, at least for the rest of 2004. Not the best of news for e-books. My little Clie SJ-22 has a spectacular screen for the price, around $100 discounted at a local office supply store, and I was looking forward to improved models. Oh, well. Sony is not a philanthropy. Details are available from Brighthand and PalmLoyal. Among the portable items that Sony will still sell here? Cell phones.
This is one more indication that the U.S. e-book industry had better get serious about the cell phone market, in line with the trend in Korea, where phone-PDA hybrids have become the rage and regular PDAs are dead. A few days ago I looked over a BestBuy insert in the Washington Post. Guess what. I couldn’t find a single PDA
Draconian DRM and the Tower of eBabel didn’t kill off or at least maim the Clie in the U.S. by themselves, but they certainly didn’t help–by shrinking the market for e-books. Way to go, Open eBook Forum. That’s one of the horrors of the present e-book world. Those proprietary formatters are causing their share of collateral damage to hardware makers, publishers, writers, and many others.
