Corel Corp, Ottawa, Canada – which is only months away from launching its WordPerfect suite rewritten in Java – has
announced a second Java initiative, but this time it’s a hardware product. Corel says it may have a personal digital
assistant available as early as March, according to a report in Electrical Engineering Times. The device is expected to be an
offline organizer that doubles as an online surfboard when connected to the Web via a built-in 28.8Kb per second modem.
Corel is looking at incorporating a 320 by 240 pixel resolution liquid-crystal display, but does not know whether to go with
the ARM RISC from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, the Motorola Inc MPC 821 embedded PowerPC, or to please Java online
begetter Sun Microsystems Inc by going with an UltraSparc processor. The software environment would consist of a Java
virtual machine and related applets for the organizer and Internet functions. Wireless communications are not on the agenda.
It’s unclear if applets from Corel intends for applets from its Java-based WordPerfect suite to run on the PDA; Corel moved its
suite to the caffeinated language hoping to ride the Network Computer momentum to greater profits (CI No 2,957).
