Sony officially unveiled three new Clie handhelds, the PEG-TH55, PEG-TJ37 and PEG-TJ27, for the U.S. market. Two of these devices, the TH55 and TJ37, were announced for Japan last week.

Sony’s Massanobu Yoshida , the Senor General Manager of the company’s Personal Communication Division , showed off these handhelds during PalmSource chief David Nagel’s keynote address at the PalmSource Developer Conference today. Yoshida also joked about the rate at which Sony has released new Clies. The number is a staggering 23 devices in just a few short years.

The TH55 brings Sony's high-resolution 320 x 480 pixel and 65,000 color display to a tablet-style PDA. Before this model, these types of displays were only found in some of the company's devices with built-in keyboards, such as the NR and NZ series. The PEG-TH55 measures around 4.9 x 3.0 x.6 inches and weighs about 5.8 ounces. It weighs 6.5 ounces with a bundled flip cover attached.


PEG-TJ55

The unit runs on Palm OS 5.2 and the Sony Handheld Engine, a Sony only chipset first found in the UX series. The clock speed of this processor goes from 8 MHz to 123 MHz depending on how much power is needed. The TH55 includes 32MB of RAM, all user available, a built-in VGA camera, a Memory Stick slot and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking.

Applications bundled with the TH55 include a PIM application called Clie Organizer, the NetFront 3.1 web browser, Clie Mail, Macromedia Flash Player 5, software to play video and audio files, and Piscel Viewer for viewing documents, including those for Micrsoft Office, but not editing them.

The TJ37 and TJ27 also run Palm OS 5.2 and have 32MB of RAM (23MB available to the user), a Memory Stick slot, a 200 MHz Motorola i.MXL dragonball ARM CPU, and a 65,000 color, 320 x 320 display. The TJ37, which is also Wi-Fi enabled , has good multimedia features, having a speaker and a headphone jack. For audio playing it comes with AeroPlayer audio, and for video there is Kinoma 2. The TJ27 is more basic.


PEG-TJ37 and PEG-TJ27

The devices weigh around 5 ounces and measure 4.5 x 3.0 x.53 inches. Other features include a VGA (640 x 480) resolution digital camera on the back like the TH55, so the PDA's display can be used as a viewfinder.

All three new Clies are slated to be available in March. The TJ27 will cost $200, the TJ37 $300 and the TJ55 $400. Sony is taking pre-orders on its website.