At the recent Business Show, Japan’s premier showcase for new information tools, Sharp Corp announced a new version of its highly successful Zaurus electronic diary or personal information tool. The PI-4000 Fax+Ink features built-in facsimile software, which when combined with a facsimile modem, enables a user to send reports and data entered on the go to a remote facsimile machine. In addition to the Zaurus hand-writing recognition feature, which can convert Japanese characters to text, the PI-4000 has a Ink-Pen function, which captures a handwritten image and scales it down as a handwritten memo. The new version has a 544Kb memory capacity, compared with the 288Kb in previous models, and user memory has been expanded to 355Kb. Sharp appears to be leading the field in the personal information tool business in Japan; at the Business Show it was also displaying its variant of Apple Computer Inc’s Newton technology, which Sharp calls the Galaxy.
