REX, from Starfish Software
Credit Cards are PDAs, too
The phone card problem has bugged me for a number of years, but I didn't associate it with PDAs until I saw the new product from Starfish Software, the REX. REX is a PCMCIA card with an LCD display and five buttons; it requires a PC to download data from. You can browse data on the device using these buttons, and have limited abilities to set values for preferences, etc, but have no way to edit data directly. At times using one requires a flurry of frantic button pressing to get to the right place. The LCD is very clear, as it doesn't require a touch sensitive layer over the screen, and battery life is reputed to be very good.
Another way of looking at the REX is as a credit card with all of the real PDA functions (diary, to do list and contact database) already built in. The small size, as with the PalmPilot makes the REX interesting to consider. Just as the PalmPilot was the first fully capable PDA to fit comfortably into a jacket pocket, so the REX is the first PDA to fit into a shirt pocket without distorting it. Given the number of people who seem to use a PalmPilot without ever bothering to learn Grafitti, REX should make an attractive alternative for them.
Starfish is run by Phillipe Kahn, the man who set up Borland, and was founded using the Sidekick software that he took back from Borland when he left. At one time, Sidekick was the best and most ubiquitous product to run on a PC. I know that I had at least four copies of it, all bought at various times and in various bundles with different computer components, and I liked it so much I didn't begrudge the repeated purchases. Although it lost much of its allure in some misguided bloatware derivatives, in its latest incarnations Sidekick is still a strong PIM (Personal Information Manager), and well suited as a desktop partner for most PDAs. Achieving full synchronisation with any PDA is a difficult task, unless you use desktop software specific to the PDA, like the PalmPilot Desktop. Partial synchronisation is relatively easy, with To Do lists and Calendars being able to synchronise with almost everything, and the Contact database is slightly harder to find a syncronisation solution for. This leaves the Notes and Memos applications on both the Newton and the PalmPilot without any means of reconciling to a desktop machine; but the standard Newton Connection Utility and Intellisync for PalmPilot support Sidekick for memo synchronisation.
I hope to have more on both Sidekick and REX in the future.
Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: November 21, 1997