AT&T Co has won the backing of NEC Corp and Toshiba Corp for its Hobbit RISC, which is optimised for handheld personal communicators, and is to market Eo Inc’s Model 440 communicator. NEC, now entrenched as AT&T’s Japanese chip manufacturing partner, will become a second source for the Hobbit. NEC and Toshiba both said they would have Hobbit-based products on the market in 1993. AT&T is to carry Eo Corp’s Personal Communicator 440 in its Phone Centers in the first quarter of next year. The The basic 440 enables users to take notes, keep an appointments diary, maintain a telephone and address list and add spoken comments to documents. Equipped with the optional modem, it enables users to send and receive electronic mail and facsimile messages; with the optional cellular phone, it offers speech telephony over the fixed telephone network or cellular network, and wireless transfer of electronic mail and facsimile (CI No 2,045). It comes with the PenPoint operating system from Go Corp in ROM. The software includes Go Mail, a pen-driven version of AT&T Mail communications software developed in partnership with AT&T EasyLink Services, and Go Fax, a diary application and a note-taking application. AT&T said a further generation of applications, such as videoconferencing and high-resolution still images, will be available on portable gadgets sooner than you think. Prices go from $2,000 for the basic model to $2,900 fully configured. It will be manufactured in Matsushita Electric Industrial Co’s assembly plant in Franklin Park, Illinois. AT&T’s announcements, coupled with its proposal to absorb McCaw Cellular Communications Inc over time, are seen as vital parts of a strategy to dominate radio communications in the US market.
