The Creation of Sony CLIÉ

How Sony Tried to Reinvent the PDA

The meetings began in late summer, inside a quiet wing of Sony’s Tokyo headquarters. Just two months earlier, the company had celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Walkman. Now it was preparing to launch something entirely new.

TV, PlayStation, and VAIO had already been positioned as Sony’s three “access points” to the networked world. But none were devices you’d carry in your pocket.

They called it the fourth gateway.

Katsumi Ihara, the newly appointed head of Sony’s Personal IT Network Company, believed the future was mobile. He wanted a device that could connect users to content, contacts, photos, music, and even the internet. Not a phone or a computer, but something in between. Just ambitious enough to be a Sony.

Behind the scenes, a quiet battle had been brewing over how to build that idea.

The result was a device unlike anything the company had made before. A digital companion, reimagined the Sony way.

They called it CLIÉ.