The latest addition to the Clié SJ stable of PDAs from Sony is the SJ33, a mid-range, Palm OS-based palmtop. It's much improved over its SJ30 sibling, with an uprated processor, integrated MP3 player and a clamshell lid design.

Sony has designed the SJ33 to remind people of the Walkman line. The back and sides are an attractive gloss black which makes it stand out from its competitors but also unfortunately also shows up every fingerprint and smudge. It's a compact unit measuring 73 x 108 x 22mm with a weight of 172g.

Along the top edge of the Clié SJ33 sit the Memory Stick slot, the infra-red port window and the headphone jack, while the left-hand side holds the JogDial, the Back button and a dual purpose switch. Turn this in one direction to switch the unit off; turn it the other way to activate the Hold function for playing MP3's with the screen off.

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Five navigation buttons sit below the screen. The middle one - the up/down scroll button - has the power LED built into the middle of it, which glows green when the Clié SJ33 is on, orange while charging and shuts off when the battery is fully charged. The battery is an 800ma Li-Ion Polymer unit that Sony rates at 17 days of average usage. This equates to approximately 10 hours of music playback with the display off, dropping to 4 with it on.

The Clié SJ33 uses the excellent 320 x 320 pixel, 65,000-colour screen found throughout the Clié range; constantly backlit, the screen is bright with first-rate colour balance either indoors or in sunlight. Protecting the screen is a hard, semi transparent flip cover which unfortunately doesn't flip all the way over, but the screen can be seen through the cover with the backlight on, and by using the JogDial, utilities can be used without opening the cover.

As you'd expect, there's a good range of utilities built in. The Palm OS provides notebook, address book, alarm/calendar and many other applications, plus there are literally thousands more available for download from the Web, so you won't be stuck for software.

Probably the 'killer' application of the Clié SJ33 is the integrated MP3 player, although it can only play files stored on a memory stick. The files themselves can be in MP3 or Sony's own ATRAC format. There is a Bass Boost function which boosts the sound quality considerably when using the supplied headphones; the internal speaker isn't that good, with poor sound quality and volume level. The background play utility lets you listen to music while doing other tasks with the Clié SJ33. Sony also includes a utility that converts WAV files into alarm sounds on a PC.

Powered by a 66MHz DragonBall Super VZ processor, the Clié SJ33 comes with just 16MB of RAM and 4MB of ROM memory but with its Memory Stick slot you can add as much memory as you can afford, although unfortunately it's not compatible with the imminent Memory Stick Pro format. Somewhat surprisingly, the Clié SJ33 uses the 4.1 version of Palm's OS rather than the new version 5.

The Clié SJ33's styling and integrated MP3 player set it apart from other PDAs in the mid-range price bracket, and while its performance is behind some Pocket PC-equipped PDAs, it's faster than a lot of its Palm OS rivals.