QuickPAD's One Pound Sub-Laptop

If all you need to do on the road is send and receive email and have access to your contact list, carrying around a laptop can make you feel like you're dragging around a ball and chain. Sometimes, a laptop can seem like overkill, but a PDA just isn't quite enough and, even though you carry around your cell phone, nobody really uses WAP. QuickPAD Technology thinks that it has hit on something that falls somewhere between a laptop and a PDA with its QuickPAD Pro. Weighing in at one pound, and with a suggested retail price of $299, QuickPAD Pro has a built-in word processor, spell checker, spreadsheet, scientific graphing calculator, database, personal organizer, day planner, and email capabilities, along with a screen that displays 16 lines with 80 characters per line. The unit holds up to 300 pages of content and has a port for external flash cards up to 128 MB. You can also use the optional Infrared receiver to transfer files to your PC. On four AA batteries, QuickPAD says the thing will give you over 200 hours of use and can be connected to a PC using the COM port or USB port if you don't go for the infrared option. Sounds like a fairly useful gadget for some folks but if no one's developing games for it, I'll bite the bullet and haul around the laptop.