Photograph: Rick Rizner

With its oversize (320-by-480-pixel) color screen, sleek bezel, built-in digital camera, and 802.11b Wi-Fi, Sony's Clie TH55 looks like a winner at first glance. But this Palm OS-based handheld's great first impression fades as soon as you begin to work with Sony's interface software-a real case of fixing something that wasn't broken to begin with.

It starts with Sony's variants on the familiar Palm home screen. You actually have two choices--but you can't have Palm's full-screen, uncluttered interface. The default is a set of tabs on the right-hand side of the screen. Most of these tabs launch specific applications, such as the Address Book or Datebook. The exception is the Applications tab, which brings you to a smaller version of the traditional Palm icons screen. The icons still include the Address Book and Datebook, but, oddly, not Sony's innovative Free Notes multimedia messaging application that allows you to create handwritten or typed messages with pictures and voice memos. Yet Free Notes has a button on the Clie's bezel, along with the Address Book and Datebook, which makes us scratch our heads as to Free Notes' place in Sony's navigation scheme. According to Sony, the interface is designed this way because you're likely to use Free Notes within Address Book or Datebook.

At the bottom of the Applications screen are two rows of six placeholders (Sony calls them shortcuts) that you can populate with icons for frequently used programs, via the Preferences menu.

The other Clie interface is launched via the Applications icon (not to be confused with the Applications tab mentioned above). This produces a completely different-looking home screen, with application icons and names in a list on the right, and the application categories filter in a square on the upper left. Below that are the same shortcuts from the tab-based interface, only here they're configured in two columns.

As if these weren't enough navigational tools, the very bottom of the screen has a little taskbar filled with icons, starting with a little house that cycles you through the home screens of the various tabs. Other icons let you launch application menus or the search feature; choose between Graffiti 2 and Decuma handwriting recognition for text input; check battery, Memory Stick, and Wi-Fi adapter status; and adjust sound volume.

Finally, all the way on the right is an arrow to launch the TH55's pop-up text input area (which reduces the application screen area to a more conventional 320 by 320 pixels).

Besides the small hardware buttons on the bottom of the bezel, there are controls on the left-hand side. From top to bottom, they include a camera shutter; a button to open and shut the lens cover on the back of the device; a cover for the Memory Stick slot; the power on/off button; and a voice recorder on/off button. For more one-handed navigation options, a jog dial and a Back button are placed near the camera lens on the back of the TH55.

Images captured with the 310,000-pixel camera were adequate, if a bit fuzzy on a PC screen. Transferring them from the PDA to a PC desktop proved no small feat: You have to store captured images on a Memory Stick, and the PDA doesn't come with one. To transfer our images to a PC, we used the Clie's USB cable and Data Import application, which basically turns the PDA into a Memory Stick reader. Then we were able to drag and drop the photos to the desktop. (A Sony representative said there was a way to transfer images without recourse to a Memory Stick, but he admitted it was difficult.) In contrast, the PalmOne Treo 600 simply copies all photos taken by its built-in camera to a PC folder whenever you perform a routine HotSync.

The voice recorder worked well, with decent sound quality through the built-in speaker. But to test said speakers with MP3s, we had almost as much trouble as we did transferring photos. The TH55 didn't see the MP3s until we put them in a specific folder on a Memory Stick, again using the Data Import application. (The folder isn't created until you first run the Audio Player, resulting in a sort of chicken-and-egg situation: You can't play the music without the folder, and you can't create the folder without trying to play music.) We eventually succeeded in playing MP3s, and they sounded as though we were playing them on a cheap radio-OK, but not great. As with most devices that have small speakers, music sounds better from the TH55 when you supply your own headphones (none come with the PDA).

The built-in Wi-Fi is one of this model's better features, with a simple setup wizard that configured the settings so that the connection worked right off the bat. The bundled NetFront browser capably crams Web pages on the small screen, though the type can be quite tiny.

We did wonder about the decision to include PicselViewer, which lets you view Microsoft Office documents. Why not bundle a program like DataViz's Documents to Go, which also lets you create and edit them? We would have found Documents to Go more useful than Free Notes, which looks cool when you first check it out, but has little practical application beyond creating colorful dispatches for e-mailing.

Sony's quirky software tweaks were enough to sour us on this unit, even though the hardware's pretty slick.

Upshot: If you live for gadgets with handsome industrial design and a long list of power-user features, the sleek Clie TH55 may delight your eyes, though it's also likely to torture your brain with its busy interface and software quirks. This is definitely a try-before-you-buy product.

Denny Arar