The Japanese approach to new products is if it can be done, do it, regardless of whether it makes any commercial sense, so Seiko Instrument Co is to take on the likes of Psion Plc in the hand-held organiser market – dominated by Sharp Corp and Casio Computer Co in Japan – with the first electronic organiser to offer speech features, reports Newsbytes Japan: the EX-3000 will have the company’s own supertwist nematic liquid crystal display, claimed to display eight characters by four lines of Kanji characters or 21 characters by eight lines of alphanumerics on the 1.6 by 4.2 screen: the whole thing measures 6.3 by 3.5 by 0.9 and weighs about 10 oz, comes with a QWERTY keyboard with rubber keys and costs $200, but the key attraction is six memory cards that plug into the thing to provide an English-Japanese dictionary at $90, a phone directory at $70, a traveller’s English conversation speech card at $70, a business English conversation speech card, $70, a golf score management card at $55, and a fortune-telling calendar at $55; the speech cards enable a user to hear English voices via an earphone plugged into the machine; Seiko does plan to export the hand-held organiser overseas, but has not decided details.
