Hong Kong-based Group Sense is betting that the market is ready for a personal digital assistant (PDA) with mobile-phone capabilities.
The company, better known for its electronic Chinese-English dictionaries, is planning to launch the device in the mainland next week and in Hong Kong in the coming month.
Group Sense executive director James Fok said the target market would be travelling executives on the mainland who needed to connect to data through voice, fax, electronic mail, short messaging or WAP.
He said personal-computer penetration was still relatively low in China and the infrastructure could not always support PCs, but professionals still needed to connect to data while on the road.
'Connecting to the Internet in a hotel wireless LAN [local area network], I think these scenarios, we are not going to see them in the next 10 years,' Mr Fok said.
Group Sense's PDA will have built-in GSM capability, connecting at a speed of 14.4 kilobits per second, and carry the company's own operating system, as well as Chinese-character recognition licensed from a developer in Beijing.
Mr Fok is hoping its price of 3,800 yuan (about HK$3,560) - about half that of other PDA phones - will help make the device the world's first mass-selling combination device.
