Citizen PDA-for-PDAs debuts on Web

French site gets first sight of Handspring Visor module

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 25th October 2000 10:01 GMT

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Citizen's PDA-for-a-PDA module, discussed recently by Handspring's Donna Dubinsky, has made its first appearance out of the Japanese company's labs.

French Handspring-oriented Web site VisorGuide has a couple of shots of the device, snapped at the recent Paris launch of Handspring's colour Visor Prism.

Dubbed the Citizen Kids, the tiny device plugs into Handspring's Springboard interface and duplicates data already stored on the PDA. Why the name is plural is anyone's guess - some bizarre Japanese translation, perhaps?

Kids is a couple of inches square and done out in translucent turquoise plastic. It sports a touch-sensitive LCD and a PalmOS-style interface.

As we noted before, we're not entirely sure why you'd want such a microscopic data reader when the whole point of the PDA it gets its data from is to be easy to and ultra-portable. Though, as various Register readers pointed out, it does at least allow Visor owners' partners to know what the other half is up to without having to carry a PDA of their own.

Still, it does seem a tad overkill to us, and we're sceptical of Kids' success, but it does look cute, as you can see from VisorGuide's pictures. ®