A clever gimmick, though a touch expensive

PROS AND CONS Product: Palmax PD1000 mini-PC Price: $7,999 Specifications: Cyrix MediaGx 120 MHz processor and Chinese Windows 95, 1.6 Gb hard disk, 16 Mb Ram, 6.1-inch TFT display, weighs 900 grams, including battery Pros: Small unit that reads Chinese handwriting Cons: Useful for beginners only, expensive Chinese handwriting-recognition has been available for some time, with plenty of products at the major computer malls. A few years ago, even Apple Computer played with Chinese handwriting-recognition - but not, unfortunately, for the Newton.

Most of the systems are bundled with small pads on which you write the characters. These pads are fine except the 'pen' - a plastic pointer - leaves no mark.

You must do the electronic equivalent of writing in air, which may work for some, but it can be quite disconcerting. The latest trend is rather clever. You write on the screen.

This is what the Palmax, a tiny (900 gram, A5 footprint) albeit full (Chinese) Windows 95 PC, lets you do. With your plastic pointing device in hand, you write directly on the screen. In fact, you write in the window of the text document you are creating.

This may take a moment or two to get used to. You write the character the way you would if you were writing on paper. After you finish, a character - often the one you wanted - appears where the cursor is. It is that simple. Well, it is supposed to be.

My Chinese name is written with the character wei (as in the country Wei in Chinese history). The character is written with 18 strokes - simplified and traditional characters are the same. It is often a little difficult to get the handwriting-recognition software to read my name, but the Palmax read it with ease.

The character hua (meaning flower or China), as in zhonghua renmin (the Chinese people), was a devil to get into the machine. I wrote it both in simplified and in traditional and got a lot of strange characters. I did not get hua, however.