PenPad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Amstrad PenPad was an early personal digital assistant and a competitor to the Apple Newton. It was an attempt by Amstrad, a UK electronics firm with a history of successful involvement in personal computing, to corner the handheld market in the UK and Europe.
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[edit] PDA600
The PenPad, also known by its model reference - PDA600, was commissioned in 1993 and the project was both innovative and functional. The project manager was Cliff Lawson, and Eden Group were used to deliver the underlying operating system. For its time the PenPad had a particularly successful handwriting recognition system compared with its contemporaries. The user would 'train' the PenPad with their own handwriting rather than using the generic recognition systems adopted by today's PDAs (Graffiti TM and Graffiti2 TM).
The device was bulky when compared with modern PDAs, but it was very functional with the standard PIM and offered expansion. It featured a calendar, address book, todo list, jot pad, world time, multiple alarms, calculator, and unit conversion on the ROM.
It had a memory capacity of 128Kb, a grey-scale screen, a folding hinged cover that protected the screen when not in use, PCMCIA type I slot for expansion, as well as a serial port to link to a PC.
Eden Group, authors of the OS used by the PDA600, wrote bespoke software for the PDA600 run on PCMCIA memory cards, in addition to the standard PIM applications. It could be 'hot-synced' with Windows via the optional extras "PC-Organiser for Windows".
[edit] Development
Development of end-user applications was possible but required investment in a card-writer in addition to the forms software from Eden Group, which restricted end-user development.
[edit] End of the line
The PenPad, like the Newton, struggled in a time where these early PDAs were expensive to produce and did not manage to capture enough interest and eventually production was discontinued. The remaining UK units being sold off to Tandy Corporation who retailed the stock through their chain of stores at £50 per unit, half the price they had cost Amstrad to build. Indeed it wasn't until the launch of the Palm Pilot 1000 in 1996 that the first truly successful PDA was born.
Amstrad did invest in R&D for a successor to the PDA600, called the PIC700, but with the end of the PenPad it never saw the light of day.
[edit] External links
A dedicated few honour the memory of the PenPad PDA600;
