The Sony Clie stopped being produced for worldwide sales in 2004. According to the announcement made by Sony at the time, new CLIE models would be sold and manufactured only for Japan. One year later, in 2005, Sony made another announcement, and the CLIE line of PDAs was discontinued completely. The models that were launched last at worldwide level were PEG-TH55, PEG-TJ37 and PEG-TJ27.
Clie PEG-VZ90 was the model that was launched last in Japan. Some time after Sony closed the Clie PDA line, they also stopped offering the original drivers for them. That is also true for the Clie Palm Desktop software, which is needed by people that want to hotsync between their PC and the PDA. Without it, many of the features of the Clie can’t be used, as long as you need a connection with the PC for them. As a result, fans of the Clie PDA started uploading these drivers on their own sites, so you can still find them, even if Sony doesn’t offer them anymore.
Sony currently offers some support on their site, with answers to a number of common questions that a Clie PDA owner might have. For example, you can learn what to do if you have problems with the HotSync function, and how to troubleshoot it, or you can learn how to transfer files to the device.
Support for Macintosh
Sony never supported Clie PDA’s for the Mac OS. They never gave users a software that will allow them to use the Clie on a Mac OS computer. Still, all Clie handhelds are capable of hotsyncing with a computer that runs Mac OS, thanks for their operating system, the Palm OS.
The Palm OS allowed the Clie to sync with the Mac OS, so in theory you could install new software on it and you could synchronize certain PIM functions. However, there was a problem with installing software, since the HotSync software for Mac didn’t recognize the Clie PDA. This ability was later added by PalmSource, so older PDA’s from Sony were recognized by its Mac desktop software. People that could only use USB synchronization found this software very useful.
Soon after, the user community of the Sony Clie found out that updating this software meant only adding a couple of lines to the file that contained the property list for the USB detection process. The result was that you can now find these instructions on the Internet, with many details, which you can use to sync your Clie PDA.
If you want to sync a Clie with a Mac OS computer by using a Bluetooth connection, you will have no problem, but surprisingly enough, using Wi-Fi to do it isn’t possible. The problem with Wi-Fi is that the HotSync software for Mac OS doesn’t support synchronization over the network. There are some things that you can do to work around this problem.
If you want a better integration of Clie and the Mac OS, you might want to try the software provided by Mark/Space, called Missing Sync. This software will allow for a Wi-Fi synchronization that is unencrypted, but unfortunately there is a bug in the network of the Clie, which reverses the IP addresses. That means that if you use a Mac OS computer, you will need an IP that is palindromic, like 10.0.0.10.