Yopy, the Linux-based multimedia personal digital assistant (PDA) South Korea's G.Mate has promised to unveil for more than three years, is at last ready to roll out.
The Yopy, on display at G.Mate's booth in the Las Vegas Comdex expo, has little resemblance to the iPaq-like device the company first announced.
That hand-held, advanced by the standards of the time, offered most of the features of the average Windows PDA on offer today.
But, rather than come out with a standard product, the company decided not to launch that original Yopy, and instead returned to the drawing board.
The result is anything but ordinary. Styled in a striking silver clam-shell design, the Yopy offers both the original full-colour display (with 65,536 colours) and a built-in keyboard.
The keyboard comes in a non-standard layout, but the keys are large enough to avoid the errors inevitable with a device such as Handspring's Treo. Scroll and navigation keys add to the functionality and give less reason to resort to the stylus for control.
It is also very slim and lightweight. The Yopy measures just 10.1 centimetres by 6.8 cm by 1.5 cm, and weighs just 141 grams. For expansion, there is infrared, RS-232C and a secure digital/multimedia card slot. With built-in microphone and speaker, the Yopy can be converted into a phone or Internet access device by adding the slim sledge G.Mate makes.