The Sony CLIÉ (creativity, lifestyle, innovation, emotion, formerly communication, link, information and entertainment) is a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) running the operating system (OS) Palm OS, developed and marketed by Sony from 2000 to 2005.

[1] Later models have been credited with spurring competition in the previously stagnant Palm market, closing many of the gaps that existed between Palm OS PDAs and those using Microsoft Windows Mobile OS, more so for multimedia, but also with Sony's proprietary application launcher interface.

Soon after the closure of the CLIÉ line, Sony stopped providing original installation drivers, including Sony's version of Palm Desktop for the CLIÉ, which are necessary for Hotsyncing with the PC and otherwise taking advantage of the handhelds' many features for which a PC may be needed.

PalmSource, however, silently added the ability to recognize older CLIÉ devices when providing new versions of its Palm Desktop software for Mac.

The CLIÉ user community soon discovered that these "updates" were simply a matter of adding a few lines to the USB-detection property-list file.