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BEING A HEAVYWEIGHT in the personal digital assistant (PDA) arena isn't such a good thing. The real hitters are in the fly-weight division, and Sharp Electronics Corp. is offering the Zaurus ZR-5000FX, a keyboard-enhanced PDA, as a contender. With its Type II PC Card (PCMCIA) slot, infrared port, optional pop-on modem (2,400bps data and 9,600bps send-only fax), and optional PC link for Macintosh or Windows, the new keyboard/touchscreen unit seems built for communications.
Compared to features in units running General Magic Inc.'s Magic Cap or Apple Computer Inc.'s Newton operating systems, several of Zaurus' features are less intuitive and somewhat buried in its menu layers and stacks of icons. Third-party communications software also seems a little slow in coming.
On the other hand, Zaurus works well with 1MB of RAM (Magic Cap apparently requires 4MB or so), which should be...