The Sony Corp Pix 100, the handheld Pick Systems database on CD-ROM (CI Nos 2,454, 2,452), enables you to wander around your prospective mansion in Bel Air, without having to leave the comfort of your current Bel Air mansion. Will this fail to ‘impact’ on your life? Well, at the moment, this is the only application dreamed up for the new Pick product that will be formally ‘pre-launched’ at Comdex in Las Vegas this November. According to Dick Pick, chairman and visionary at Pick, Sony do not really know what they’re doing with the product, and is trying to think of other applications. The Pix 100 is about the same size as a Psion Plc Series 3, with a liquid crystal diode screen, keyboard, hard disk, television, microphone, compact disk sound system, aerial socket and CD-ROM. The current application will store around 30,000 houses, with differing levels of detail. Users can key in criteria, and then look at the selected houses. Pick hopes it will be the first pocket multimedia system. Glyn Yarnall, sales director at Pick Systems UK, believes this is not the way forward for Pick, but serves the useful purpose of bringing the Pick name to a wider audience. Sony went for Pick as it was one of the few operating systems that would fit, running with an XT bus an with a maximum memory of 650Kb, but claimimg the video and audio quality of 1.4Mb. It proves the flexibility of the Advanced Pick operating system, running the same system on a mainframe or a hand-held device. Dick Pick also believes that What’s really missing in multimedia and what it is going to take for someone to be a real big hit in it, is data management… tying the whole thing together with a robust database, and Pick is looking to take a major share of the multimedia market. Pick sees his delightfully unconventional company co-ordinating the multimedia explosion, creating the standards for multimedia code operating system and data management. As to Viewer, Microsoft Corp’s offering, for Pick, the product that they have running on this Pix 100 is an absolute dog, we’re just going to totally blow it out the water!
