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First new UI on PDAs for years- Picsel on Sony Clie

Picsel is a technology which actually allows you to play Doom, in a window, on a PDA - while simultaneously displaying the operation of a cut-and-paste from a Word document into an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Finally, someone has decided this might be a good idea: it's Palm franchisee, Sony.

Picsel Technologies made the annoucement of the deal with Sony at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Nevada. Sony will include Picsel's Viewer technology on the PalmOS platform within the latest Clie, Sony's Handheld Personal Entertainment Organizer - the PEG-NZ90.

It may take a while before everybody who wants one, gets one. The new Clie with Picsel's Viewer, "will debut in the United States by March 2003." There's no detail about where else in the world it will ship, or when.

However, we do know that Samsung is planning to use Picsel technology in its rival to the HTC-built Microsoft Stinger, when it announces its smartphone later this year. Some observers expect to see this at 3GSM in Cannes, next month, but neither Samsung nor Microsoft will confirm. And Samsung has a parallel smartphone project under way with Symbian, and there is no launch date for that, either.

In a parallel announcement, Picsel revealed that one of Scott McNealy's top advisers has joined the board of the GUI pioneer. Masood Jabbar, former executive vice president, global sales operations for Sun Microsystems, currently serves in an advisory capacity for Scott McNealy, chairman, president and chief executive officer, at Sun.

The user interface which Picsel has devised utterly overturns all previous PDA assumptions about how a pocket computer should look, and work. "Picsel's technology allows mobile device users the freedom to utilize any form of digital content in a seamless, graphically rich environment," is the official phrase. This utterly fails to convey just how remarkably different a Picsel screen is from any other sort.

Exactly what "Viewer" is, will have to wait till we see the new Clie. The technology which Picsel has been showing before now was called ePage, a multimedia viewer for all PDA and phone platforms. At last year's Symbian developer conference in London, Picsel demonstrated the software on an Ericsson smartphone running Symbian, on a Pocket PC (an iPaq) and on a Palm device.

But the new name seems to be the same technology. The announcement does reveal that the latest PEG-NZ90 model will be powered by a 200MHz ARM-compliant processor and features an integrated 2 Mega Pixel digital camera. "With Picsel's exclusive technology, users can optimally display files, including all popular office formats (including MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, HTML and Standard Image Formats) in a visually rich environment," says the official release - a good description of what ePage used to do. "Information can be viewed, manipulated and redistributed, to any mobile device, across any network, without content reengineering or the source application residing on the device," it concludes.

Picsel boss Imran Khand wasn't giving too much away at the launch: "The new Clie PEG-NZ90 using Picsel's Viewer technology is a significant competitive advantage for Sony in the handheld device marketplace," he said. Khand, cofounder and chief executive officer of Picsel Technologies, continued: "The combination of Picsel's Viewer and Sony's Clie frees consumers to access uncompromized digital content on mobile devices."

Toshinori Nakamura, general manager of business strategy, Handheld Computer Company, Sony Corporation, said, "The Clie product line is redefining the role of handheld devices. Sony selected Picsel's innovative technology for our Clie to offer users an unprecedented, rich experience in interacting with a variety of file types. Sony's unique technology combined with the Picsel Viewer for Clie will enhance the handheld experience, reinforcing our position as the world's foremost consumer electronics brand."

Here follows a short summary of information provided in the press release:

Picsel Technologies is a global provider of mobile software solutions to leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), carriers, operating system developers and content players. Founded in Glasgow, Scotland in 1998, the Company has since opened additional offices in Asia and the US.

Picsel's ePage multimedia content engine enables virtually any type of file or object to be viewed and manipulated on mobile devices, PDA's, games consoles, settop boxes and in-car systems, without the source application being resident or the content re-engineered. By embedding the engine into such devices, content throughput and on-screen performance is dramatically improved. Therefore new, aesthetically superior multimedia applications can now be developed for these platforms.

The technology may be optimized for a variety of devices, screen sizes and operating systems, and may sit on top of or be embedded into the resident operating system. In enabling PC content to be utilized easily on a wealth of beyond-PC devices, Picsel can assist device manufacturers, network operators and content providers to bridge the gap between the PC and beyond-PC environments – maximizing the latent potential of existing bandwidth, hardware, technologies and content. Additional information on Picsel is available at www.picsel.com Sony's Home Page URL: www.sony.net/