Dave's Favorites: Want a Camera With Your PDA?

Back when I was in college and pocket calculators had only recently gotten inexpensive and popular, I predicted that eventually everything we bought would come with a calculator built in. These days, I have another ludicrous prediction: Eventually, everything will have a digital camera built in.

Maybe that's not so crazy. Sony's newest Palm-powered PDA, the Clie PEG NX80V, is just one of many handheld devices popping up on shelves with a built-in digital camera. The NX80V's 1.3-megapixel camera takes sharp, colorful images--proving that integrated cameras aren't just gimmicks. PDAs really can take good pictures. The PDA even has a light that does a reasonable job of illuminating a dark room: It uses a lot less power than a flash unit, and extends the Clie's battery life.

The Clie comes with a great collection of software. Sony includes its superb Picsel Viewer--which lets you view images, Office documents, and PDFs exactly the way they look on the desktop, with no conversion needed. There's a photo album built right into the device's ROM, and you can copy images between your computer and the PDA via Memory Stick media. Unlike older Clies, all images are stored in good-old JPEG format. The Clie also records video with sound, so you can use it to make short movies.

The Clie PEG NX80V is very nearly perfect. It has the highest-resolution PDA screen on the market (320 by 480 pixels), and its clever clamshell design lets it work like a tiny laptop or a slate-style tablet, depending upon your mood. In addition to the Memory Stick slot, the Clie has a CompactFlash slot and works with Sony's CompactFlash Wi-Fi adapter.

One drawback: The Clie PEG NX80V comes with 32MB of memory, and only 15.5MB is available right out of the box--the rest, unfortunately, is reserved for applications. But that's a small compromise to make for what could well be the best PDA ever to walk the earth.

This much is certainly true: I've used one for about a month now, and it has changed the way I take pictures. I now grab more snapshots and take a lot more little movies of everyday scenes. And when you get right down to it, isn't the definition of a successful product one that changes your life?

At press time I found the NX80V for less than $500 at the PCWorld.com Product Finder.

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