Its really tough to figure out what Sony’s up to. Not long after they announce that they are drastically scaling down their PDA business by pulling out of the US and European markets, they drop a mini bombshell on the PDA community by being the first PDA-maker out of the gate with an OLED screen. Their new model is the PEG-VZ90, which has a landscape oriented, 480 by 320-pixel, 65k color OLED screen. These new screens are typically lighter and thinner, and use much less power to produce much brighter colors than traditional LCD screens (although the new model doesn’t seem to have benefitted from it size-wise, since it’s nearly an inch thick).

The VZ90’s specs are pretty close to those of the UX50, including the same ‘handheld engine’ with a 123-Mhz processor, but it adds a Compact Flash slot which can take an ordinary CF memory card.

Of course, this new model is for the Japanese market only (and it’s damn expensive, costing more than $800), but here’s hoping that such screens soon find their way into other PDAs from other manufacturers.