Old Hardware Emulated :PalmSim Emulating The Sony Clie

 

Sony Has A Few Tricks Up Its Sleeve

Sony Clie Boot Screens

Once upon a time, Sony was known for things other than the PlayStation. Through the 70's-90's, Sony was well known for there high-quality consumer electronics, especially with audio equipment. There Trinitron TV's were the best one could buy during during that time too. The Sony Walkman allowed people to take there music with them. The Walkman's were synonymous with music, like with the iPod and later iPhone. Of course there is the PlayStation which was introduced in Japan at the tail-end of 1994 and here in North America at the start of 1995. There Bravado TV's were very popular for a long time. Sony had been long recognized for there handheld devices, regardless of whether they were Walkman's, potable CD players, the PlayStation Portable, FM radio's, and of course, there PDA's.

While most Palm OEM's simply made slightly more up-scaled versions of the Palm III and V, Sony was going all out. A much bigger display and more powerful processor were going to be the selling point. The Clie was going to be that early 2000's fashion statement. It was also going to be as functional as elegant. This was going to be that must own device that everybody wanted. For Palm, this was seen as a good thing as the maker of the utilitarian handhelds were going to see there OS used for an up-scaled device. This was just in time too.

In 2000, Compaq released there line of iPaq PDA's to critical acclaim. These Windows CE handhelds had powerful multimedia capabilities which rapidly redefined the expectations of an handheld. Knowing what was now possible, PDA users wanted more. Sony would release there answer to the iPaq with the Clie. Various Clie models were released from 2000 until 2005 when the line was discontinued 

The Sony Clie used there own Palm application launcher which was different from the default one used in PalmOS proper. The programs were listed in an vertical manner and could be accessed by scrolling up and down using a jogwheel. This was very similar to how scrolling worked on the RIM Blackberry's. Like PalmOS, programs could be placed in different categories that were shown in the upper left part of the screen.

One of the big selling points of the Clie was its hi-res screen. Applications written for PalmOS 1-4 conformed to 160 by 160 screen resolution. PalmOS 5 devices upped the resolution to 320 by 320 pixels. Technically, the PalmOS 5 screen dimensions are actually 320 by 480, but the bottom 250 pixel on the lower part of the screen is consumed by the DIA (Dynamic Input Area). On the Clie devices, the DIA is hidden until needed, which greatly increases screen real-estate for Clie-specific programs.

Not surprisingly, Sony developers had to modify PalmOS 5 in order to get such capabilities, which further fragmented the the Palm ecosystem as specific Clie Palm applications making use of the bigger screen couldn't run on standard Palms. However, many third-party programs could take advantage of the Clie's features. 

Plucker has more screen real-estate, which means more reading space for those off-line webpages. e-Readers made use of this extra as well which meant more words could be shown on the screen at one. Imaging programs like Acid Image  could display larger images in more detail because of the higher-res screen. 
PalmSim Clie's simulator running AcidImage

Plucker's offline viewer taking advantage of the larger screen

The Kinoma panoramic viewer running under the simulated Clie.

Simulation

The PalmOS 5 SDK simulator supported various Palm models, including the Clie running PalmOS 5. As mentioned in the previous article, technically, this is an simulator and not an emulator. PalmSim can't run ARM-specific applications. PalmOS 5 applications have to be recompiled in x86 machine code in order to run on the simulator. However, "generic" programs that used the frameworks without using ARM-specific features could run. 

Like the other simulators, I ran this one on my IBM Thinkpad T41 running Windows XP. This is where the screenshots came from. Like the other PalmSims, this one might run under a XP virtual machine as well. However, I haven't tried it, so I can't comment on it. 

The Clie showed that PalmOS could be a multimedia powerhouse. This idea was largely dismissed until those critics saw it in action. The Clie would give the iPaq and other handhelds a run for there money while reinvigorating the Palm scene while bringing multimedia to PalmOS.

Articles of Interest
Wikipedia - Sony Clie : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLI%C3%89
palmSource - Palm OS Garnet : https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/garnet.html

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