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152 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great piece of hardware, June 6, 2003
By A Customer
I've had the SJ-22 for about two weeks now. (It's probably my fourth or fifth PDA, I don't even remember at this point.) I normally prefer the old Palm III form factor, but the SJ-22's smaller size works fine. It's still a pretty "normal" thickness, so it's comfortable to hold even despite it's diminutive appearance. It feels very solid and well built too, and actually feels better than any metal PDA I've used (including Sony's high-end PDAs).The buttons and controls on it are well designed (even the odd choice of an up/down rocker that's harder to press up than down works fine). The screen's excellent, for any price point really, let alone the price Sony's charging for this thing. It's significantly better than Palm's Tungsten T or M515, though maybe not quite as good as the Zire 71 or Sony's NX line. When inserted, Memory Sticks are flush with the casing, so they can be left in the unit all the time. I would have liked a slightly easier to press power button-but that's a minor complaint. Even the included leather flip cover does its job better than I expected. It also includes Sony's standard metal stylus. It's a bit too thin, as all Sony stylus' are, but I appreciate that it's metal. Many significantly more expensive PDAs include plastic stylus, which really don't feel as good to use. I don't find the job dial and back button particularly useful, but they're well designed, unlike the PocketPC PDAs that include them (the jog dial actually rotates completely around, it doesn't just tilt up and down). The SJ-22 also uses Graffiti. REAL Graffiti, not "Graffiti 2/JOT" that the PalmOS 5.2 devices are using. For me that's a big deal, as I can't stand JOT (to the point where I may never buy a PDA that only uses it). While it has "only" the same 33-mhz Dragonball processor that's been in PalmOS PDAs for years, it actually feels and benchmarks faster than any other 33-mhz Palm I've used...meaning it's very fast. For the heck of it, I tried playing some movie trailers I created in the Kinoma video format, and was surprised to find that the SJ-22 actually plays 30fps full screen video extremely well (looks almost identical to the faster ARM based PDAs). If this had more advanced sound instead of the standard old PalmOS speaker, it would actually be very good at multimedia (without more advanced sound, video is more of a curiosity than anything else). Obviously the included 16MB goes far on a PalmOS device, especially when many programs and documents can be stuck on a memory stick. Unsurprisingly (since it's a Palm), I haven't had a single crash or any strange behavior since I've started using it. I'm sure there's SOME weird piece of software out there that doesn't agree with it, but the dozens of programs I've been using for years work great. One small complaint is that the SJ-22 doesn't seem to do that great of a job displaying photos from a memory stick taken from a Sony digital camera. It seems to `cheat' when displaying them and cut out a lot of detail-something Sony's higher-end NX line doesn't do. Importing pictures from a computer to the SJ-22 using Sony's Picture Gear software DOES use the screen to its full potential (which is really quite amazing looking), but it would have been nice to get the same quality when viewing pictures directly out of a Sony camera, as the SJ-22 has a larger screen than most cameras. Battery life seems to be excellent. I leave my PDAs plugged in to my computer while at work, so I rarely go more than a day or two before recharging. That said, even with fairly heavy use I don't think I've seen the battery indicator drop below 100%. A Tungsten T I tried seemed to blow through the battery when just browsing through a To-Do list for a few minutes. The battery compartment is user accesable. I don't think Sony has any official replacement for the battery (the compartment was designed to be opened so that the battery can be recycled), but it may be possible to use a third party battery when it dies in a few years. The only `issue' with the SJ-22 is that, as has been mentioned by others, Sony cut corners with what comes packaged with it. No cradle (a $30 extra), although the included cable works fine, so it's not a big loss (it just means one has to manually click "hotsync" from the hotsync app rather than hitting a button on the cradle). It also lacks software to sync with Mac OS, or Outlook, and lacks an Office type program (though all are available separately if desired). I don't feel remotely cheated though-the SJ-22 is a great piece of hardware, and is worth the price just for the hardware even without many included extras. One last note-I was hesitant to buy the SJ-22 because for some reason every store display model I tried seemed to have inaccurate Graffiti. Letters just seem to come out semi-randomly for me. So far, after two weeks of use I've had no problems at all with my unit. It might just be that the graffiti area is a bit smaller than on most PalmOS PDAs, and I just wasn't used to it. The SJ-22's price is cheap, and they cut some corners on the software bundle, but they didn't cut corners on the hardware. The hardware's actually a great design, and in many cases preferable to or competitive with PDAs three times it's price (aside from the lack of much media support). Well worth considering if you don't care about playing videos/listening to music, or if you just want a good price on a good PDA.
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