A seven-employee Minneapolis-based start-up company, Radio Computer & Telephone Corp, is developing a pocket-sized personal communicator that combines the functions of an XT, a cellular telephone, a pager and tape recorder, US PC Week reports. The Pocket Office, due to ship in quantity in the autumn, is aimed at mobile workers who need to receive, store and transmit speech and data over wired and cellular telephone lines. Where most of the planned personal communicators support pen input, Radio Computer has eschewed this in favour of the capability to exchange messages with pagers and run MS-DOS applications. The idea is to collapse the functions of the personal organiser, the cellular telephone and the pager that many travelling employees now tote with them, into a single device. It will accept data vie the serial port or via a 40Mb disk that fits into the single PCMCIA Type III slot. The $2,000 2 lbs device will come bundled with telephone book, calendar, memo pad and facsimile software.
