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Sony made headlines this summer when it announced it would stop selling Clie handhelds outside of Japan. As the most adventurous of PDA vendors, the electronics giant helped drive competitors like palmOne and Hewlett-Packard to new heights by always coming up with innovative products.

That same spirit permeates Sony's newest handheld, the Clie PEG-VZ90, its first since before the summer.

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 is built on Palm OS 5.2.1—also known as 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.

Sony should release the VZ90 in Japan later this month for 89,800 Yen, which is about $820. We don't expect it to ship anywhere else—although you may be able to purchase the VZ90 from an importer. Of course, you would still have to get around the Japanese version of the Palm operating system.