Eden Group Ltd, the company behind Amstrad Plc’s PDA600 personal digital assistant (CI No 2,131) says it looking for partners to manufacture and sell two new prototype machines. Amstrad Plc has confirmed that it is talking to the company about taking on at least one of the products. The more innovative is the ‘PenTel’, a feature-phone without keys which combines Eden’s pen-driven organiser features – address book, handwriting recognition and so forth, with a handset, autodialler and facsimile modem. The product sounds exactly like a sketch that Amstrad issued at the launch of the PDA, and which was described as a possible future direction. Rainow, Cheshire-based Eden says that it has been working with unnamed telecommunications operators and user groups on the design of the phone, and envisages both business customers and consumers being interested in the device. The PenTel capitalises on the pen interface by enabling users to send sketches and data to fax machines, other PenTels, network servers or personal computers, but, just as importantly, it avoids the mass of incomprehensible keys that currently bedevil multifunction phones. The company quotes a target retail price of UKP300. The second product, the A5 PaperTalk is essentially an up-market version of the Amstrad PDA. Together with the normal features, it incorporates a monochrome liquid crystal VGA screen, facsimile modem, infra-red communications and a PCMCIA type 2 slot for peripheral expansion.
Notable
But the most notable addition is the inclusion of a full blown MS-DOS environment, not so that existing applications can run (the device hasn’t got a keyboard), but so that developers can write new programs for it. Eden continues to eschew either Go Corp’s PenPoint or Microsoft’s Windows for Pen Computing on the grounds that they are too resource-hungry: instead the developer gets MS-DOS and access to the handwriting recognition and graphic interface hooks built into ROM. Managing director David Crisp says that he is talking to three potential manufacturers at the moment, one of which is presumably Amstrad. He believes that agreement may be only a month or two away, however any deal is not necessarily exclusive. Unlike its competitors, Eden is still avoiding building in support for wireless data networks in its machines: it’s an attractive market on paper but we’ve looked at the available technology and put together designs, but haven’t taken it very far because the pricing just hasn’t worked says Crisp. Eden’s licensing policy is relatively flexible, but usually works on an initial charge plus royalty basis.
