ULTRA-MOBILE COMPUTERS & YOU

Whatever you want to call these things, in this feature we’ll be exploring the history of the ultimate in tiny computers – not including the now-ubiquitous smartphone. We’ll start with early and ground-breaking models in the 1980s, through to the more mature models in the ‘90s. We’ll also take a look at the UMPC craze of the 2000s and the wilderness years that followed, and dive deep into the resurrection of this form currently taking place in China, examining the models that are on the market today and where they’re going in the future.

So how do you classify these computers? Well, to pull some rules out of nowhere, we’re going to define these as something that can fit ideally in your pocket; has some kind of integrated keyboard; and something that has a screen that comes in under 9-inches, at a stretch, though less than eight would be ideal.

For simplicity’s sake, we also need to establish what to call these things too. We’ve decided to settle on “pocket computers” for smaller machines, and “ultra-portable” for the bigger offerings, though it’s worth pointing out these are pretty interchangeable terms, too.

Of the many super-small computers out there, we’ve had to whittle down the choices to just a select few – sadly, there are only so many small machines we can cover, but hopefully it’s enough to give you a flavour of the ultra-portable history.

THE BEGINNING OF POCKET COMPUTERS

Defining the first pocket computer is difficult due to the popularity of electronic organisers in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the title of first real pocket computer is generally awarded to Radioshack’s TRS-80 Pocket Computer (aka. Tandy Pocket Computer), so let’s start there.

Infancy

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was launched in July 1980. Despite the American branding, this machine is actually a re-badged Sharp PC-1211 from Japan.

This 70g handheld may look like a normal scientific calculator, but it also packed a QWERTY keyboard, 1.5KB of RAM, and two 4-bit CPUs running at 256KHz. Most