Back in June, Sony announced it would stop selling Clie handhelds outside of Japan. The first Sony PDA to appear since that announcement, the Clie PEG-VZ90, shipped in that country last month. As with Sony's previous devices, the VZ90 demonstrates the electronics giant's innovative spirit, which helped push the Palm platform to new heights over the years.

To the chagrin of many Sony Clie fans, you, of course, couldn't buy the handheld in the United States.

That is, until now.

Gadgets importer Dynamism is offering the VZ90 in this country: The operating system is in Japanese, however. If you're okay with that, then you can purchase the new handheld for a whopping $1099, which is considerably more than the 89,800 Yen (around $820) it goes for in Japan.

For those who want the VZ90, but not with a Japanese OS, Dynamism said it is working on converting the device to English. Although, it won't be possible to do a complete OS language conversion, Dynamism's attempt would most likely make the VZ90 easier to use for Americans.

Sony Clie PEG-VZ90
The VZ90 not only deviates from previous Clie designs, it is the first handheld to feature an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display, which have been used as smaller secondary screens in digital cameras, for example, but never in a PDA before.

Why is OLED important?

Because OLED technology delivers more vivid colors in a display that is lighter, thinner and more energy efficient than traditional screen technologies. It achieves these benefits because the compounds used in OLED displays glow when an electric current passes through each pixel, negating the need for a backlight.

The VZ90's OLED display measures a large 3.8 inches and is only 2.14mm thick. It supports a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels at 65,636 colors. That's the upper end for a Palm-based handheld but short of the VGA screens integrated into some new and upcoming Pocket PCs.

(Sony also announced it would mass produce the same display it is using in the VZ90 for other devices. So the 3.8-inch screen may find its way into other Sony products and handhelds from other manufacturers.)

Unlike other Clies, the VZ90 sports a tablet design with a screen that slides up to expose six hardware buttons and a five-way D-Pad for navigation. Although the display is landscape orientated, users can run some applications in portrait mode.

At 4.3 x 3.4 x 0.9 inches, the handheld is a little larger than some other PDAs, but at 9.5 ounces it is one of the heaviest. The VZ90's Lithium Ion Polymer battery promise 4 hours of video or 42 hours of audio with the screen turned off.

Sony implemented its own processor into the new Clie. Unlike the Intel Xscale models found in many other handhelds, Sony's CPU throttles from 8MHz to 128MHz, depending on how much juice is needed. The handheld supports Wi-Fi but not Bluetooth.

There is also 64MB of RAM (40MB available to user) and 128MB of ROM with 95MB available as a sort of internal memory card.

Speaking of memory cards, the VZ90 has both Memory Stick and CompactFlash Type II slots. With the CompactFlash slot, however, you are limited to a maximum of a 2GB card even though the format supports much larger capacities. Fortunately, you can play video on these cards, something you couldn't do in earlier Clies.

Interestingly, the VZ90, as with palmOne's new Tungsten T5, is built on Palm OS Garnet—and not Palm OS Cobalt, the platform's newest operating system. We expected Cobalt devices to ship by now, as PalmSource released the upgrade to device manufacturers late last year.