ENTER THE Z88

One year after the Amstrad buy-out, Clive Sinclair re-emerged with a new computer at the Which? Computer Show in Birmingham.

Being primarily a showcase for business computers the Which? show isn't the sort of event that would get a lot of coverage in ZX, but this year's show would include a Press conference at which Sir Clive Sinclair would announce his re-entry into the computer industry with the launch of the Z88 portable computer. So, notepad in hand, I headed north to witness the Second Coming.

After taking a wrong turn and finding myself in the Caravan and Boating Exhibition (that wind-powered disc drive turned out to be a 20ft yacht) I eventually found my way into Halls 4 and 5 of Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre.

As you'd expect at a business exhibition the hardware and software on show tended to be functional rather than entertaining. Everywhere you looked there were printers, from relatively cheap (under £500) dot-matrix jobs right up to top of the range laser printers that would be out of reach of all but the wealthiest home computer owners. Citizen were there with, among others, their LSP-10 and 120D models which were probably the cheapest machines on show at £275 and £189 each. Both of these got the thumbs-up in recent issues of ZX, and it seems that a lot of people like Citizen printers because the company claim to be selling a printer somewhere in the world every four minutes.

Printers apart, the main thrust of the show seemed to be into the field of desktop publishing. Amstrad, Commodore, Apple, Apricot, all the big names were there with desktop packages aimed at turning us all into mini Robert Maxwells. That sort of technology is slowly coming within reach of home computer owners (Softek's Artist II and Writer offer 'pagemaker' facilities of a sort), but I think we'll have to wait for the next generation of Spectrums before any daily newspapers start rolling out of our front rooms.

The closest that the various exhibitors got to home computing was with a number of Amiga and Atari ST packages that were a bit boring anyway, although Psion's Chess is worth watching on any machine. Tatung were there plugging the Einstein 526, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention.

Creative Sparks Distribution were there, announcing their new Status label. The first releases on the label are Quest For The Ring and Fortune Teller, two games for that most popular of home computers, the IBM, but a few Status games should eventually find their way onto the Spectrum.

The high spot of the morning though, was an advertising video produced by one company in which John Cleese attempts to run IBM software on a dead fish. Well, it was better than watching another load of printers churning out sales figures.

Come 1:30 it was off to the Press office for Sir Clive's great announcement. The new machine, it turned out, is called the Z88 and is produced by Cambridge Computer Ltd. a new company partly owned by Sinclair Research and with Sir Clive as chairman.

LIGHTWEIGHT DIVISION

We all knew that it was intended to be a portable business machine, since that had been announced even before last year's deal with Amstrad. Previous attempts at providing a decent amount of computing power in a portable machine had, according to Sir Clive, resulted in compromises in weight resulting in machines weighing in at about a full stone. The Z88 is smaller than a sheet of A4 paper (in other words it would fit onto this page), weighs under two pounds and will cost about £230 including VAT.

There were no machines available for bench testing, but the specs sounded interesting. It has a basic 32K RAM which can be expanded up to 3Mbytes with 32, 128 and 1Mbyte cartridges. The 128K ROM holds the operating system, word-processing and spreadsheet software, along with a few extra bits and pieces like a calculator, diary, and a clock/calendar.

The Z88 runs BBC Basic "because it's fast and widely known". The BBC machines are 6502 based while the Z88 is still Z80 based, but is comparable to the BBC's second processor according to Sir Clive, though BBC programs couldn't run on the machine because of differences in the display.

In addition, while the Z88 won't actually run IBM software (what do you expect for 200?) it does allow you to transfer data files, such as spreadsheets or word-processing files to and from IBM compatible machines. There is a built-in RS232 port, and a modem (£100) will soon be available.

The whole shebang runs on four penlight batteries, which give 20 hours of 'computing time". This means 20 hours of actually using the machine for processing information, but when the machine is not actually in use the batteries will keep the contents of memory intact for about a year so you shouldn't have to worry about losing vital information when the batteries pack up (or for that matter when you take the batteries out to replace them, since there is a back-up which protects the memory while this is done).

The display is a form of LCD, called "Supertwist" which means that you don't have to stand upside down and look at the display from the right angle in order to see it clearly. The layout consists of a central display of eight lines of 80 characters, and on each side of this there is a window. The left hand window is a menu containing the various operating modes of the Z88, while on the right is an interesting feature a mini-display of the full 64-line page which is updated as work is carried out. This is the sort of feature that is only available on some of the most expensive wordpro machines, so getting it onto a portable is quite clever.

After the Press conference I asked Sir Clive what happened to Sinclair Research's own flat screen technology. Had that ever been considered?

"We looked at it for a long time" he told me. "But we couldn't get 80 characters onto it, and everyone told us they wanted 80."

If the Z88 lives up to its aims then Cambridge Computer could have a success on their hands. The specifications are as good as you're likely to get from a portable machine and much cheaper than any of the competition. I doubt if it'll set the world alight the way the Spectrum once did or fail as spectacularly as the QL. On the whole it seems to be a fairly sound machine, sensibly aimed at a strong market and should provide Sir Clive with a much needed boost to his commercial credibility.

SILENT KEYBOARD

The only slightly dubious feature of the machine is that old Sinclair favourite, the keyboard. They wanted a keyboard which would be "virtually silent" so that it could be used in meetings without rattling away and getting on everyone's nerves. So they've opted for a keyboard moulded out of 'silicon rubber'. The whole thing is moulded out of a single sheet of this material, and while it's claimed to be good enough for touch typing it does bring back memories of the old rubbery Spectrum keyboard. That's a feature that a lot of people will probably be watching quite closely, though in the brief time that I got my hands on one it did seem to be better than the Spectrum board.

The machine is due for an April launch and will initially be available by mail order (which prompted one person to ask "does the 88 refer to the year when it will arrive'?). It will be aimed mainly at the business market, though Sir Clive added that there might be an educational use. It was priced, he said "so as not to give anyone a reason for not buying it." So does he see the Z88 creating its own market, as the ZX81 and Spectrum did, or does he simply hope to fill a gap in the already established business market?

"Well, you always aim at a market and we do have businesses and domestic use in mind, but you do get surprised. For instance the Spectrum went very games orientated." Which is about where I came in.

LIKEABLE LAP-TOP

The Z88 portable is Sir Clive Sinclair's most recent innovation. Is it a real breakthrough or another lost opportunity? Geof Wheelwright examines the evidence.

Sir Clive Sinclair has done it again. His latest offering, the Z88 - this time offered under the brand name Cambridge Computer as the rights to use the Sinclair name were sold to Amstrad - continues a long tradition of producing innovative low- cost Z80 based machines.

At £200 this ultra-light battery-operated portable computer breaks new ground in a number of areas - although not all of them are something that Sir Clive should be particularly proud of.

The first and creditable pioneering feature is the price. The Z88 is undoubtedly the first portable of this specification to be priced significantly under the £400 price mark. You may be able to pick up older Tandy Model 100 or NEC PC8201 portables at this price (incidentally, they are a good buy if you do), but there are no new machines in this league that approach Sir Clive Sinclair's low price.

Another matter entirely, however, is what you get for the price. The simple feature list includes a weight of less than two pounds, dimensions that make the entire package no larger than a thick A4 magazine, a built-in eighty character by eight line supertwist LCD display, built-in word-processing, database, time and data management software, a claimed 20 hour battery life, 32K RAM minimum (expandable up to 4MB internally), a Z80 version of BBC Basic, an RS232 port for printing and data transfer and a document layout screen that shows you in a dynamically updated fashion just how your final document will look.

A number of these features are quite problematic. The first innovation is the display, which is of the older 8 line by 80 column type. While this is augmented by an well-designed windowing system that allows you to see document commands, page preview and machine status along with the main screen, these nice touches do not overcome the flaws of the display.

It is flawed for several reasons - not the least of which is the availability of full-screen (ie. 80 columns by 25 lines] LCD displays of the supertwist and backlit types. These may have required a little more power and cost a little more to buy, but would have been far more attractive than the smaller screen Sir Clive selected.

NO DESCENDERS

The display is made worse by the character set which is composed entirely of letters with no descenders. The bottom half of a letter such as 'g'. 'p' or 'y' is scrunched into the same space as a non-descended character such as 'f'.

To give Sir Clive his due, however, the screen was by no means unreadable on the pre-pre-production machine I saw at the Which Computer Show launch in February, and will probably prove adequate for most portable data-entry tasks if people can get the hang of the dynamic page layout facility - which I again unreservedly applaud. I felt he could have bought a better display which showed a good deal more, but I can understand how that might have proved a threat to both battery life and the low price of the machine.

The second rather odd innovation is in the way memory is handled in the unexpanded machine. The machine, as advertised, is due to come with 32K - of which only a maximum of 15K is available. For a machine which is supposed to be a portable notebook among other things, this is not a great deal of room.

Sir Clive points out that this limitation could be overcome by adding a 32K or 128K RAM cartridge (which come as either standard CMOS RAM for £19.95 and £49.95, respectively, or as an EPROM for £12.95 and £49.95). Those who choose the EPROM route for memory expansion and wish to erase information they put onto them will also have to purchase a £49.95 ultra-violet EPROM eraser. I suspect, however, that these memory add-ons may not be available at the same time as the machine itself, so you probably will have to limp along with the basic 15K memory for at least a little while. If my scepticism is proved inappropriate you will be able to add up to 384K RAM to the system right away (the Z88 offers room for the addition of up to three memory cartridges).

PROMISING SOFTWARE

Things are not all cloudy on the Sinclair horizon, however, as the internal software actually looks quite good. The word-processing software, for example, includes multiple column layout. Integration of spreadsheet information within the word-processor, search and replace functions and on-screen page breaks. As everything happens in RAM, you can easily switch between word-processing, spreadsheet and diary functions without having to execute any 'save' functions first. Commands within the various Z88 applications seem to be fairly consistent so that anyone who takes the time to use the word-processor will subsequently have fewer problems getting to grips with the database, spreadsheet, diary functions and so on.

Printing takes place via the R8232 port, not an unusual state of affairs given the recent standardisation of serial port printing by companies like Apple but not, as Sir Clive indicated, by IBM or any major compatible manufacturer. It would have been nice, and not too expensive, if he had been able to add a parallel printer port as well.

Printing is not the only way you can get information out of the Z88. To allow users to move text and other data, generated by the Z88, back and forth between it and a PC, Cambridge Computer is offering a 'transfer pack'. This is a cable which runs between a PC and the Z88, some IBM-compatible communications software, and instructions on how to use it with the Z88. Although not completed at the time of launch, this crucial ingredient to integration in any kind of PC-based office is claimed to be a method of moving data back and forth between the two machines in data formats that include those used by Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect.

if you have no iBM-compatible machine at hand, Sinclair is proposing an alternative way to get information out of the z88. This is via a planned modem, which Cambridge Computer has said will conform to the Prestel 1200/75 communications standard. Unfortunately, this is possibly the worst choice for communications speed as thez288 screen does not really lend itself to a proper display of Prestel graphics.

TEXT TRANSFER

A portable machine largely concerned with the transfer of text would be much better suited to using 300 or 1200 baud modems that could make better use of electronic mail, on services such as Telecom Gold and One to One. If, however, the RS232 port is reasonably buffered then independent software and hardware companies may start to produce a better communications system that's a little more sensible. This issue though, is one about which I can't begin to make a judgement on until the company starts shipping production machines.

Not having another PC around or wanting to bother with a modem will leave you with no other method of storage. Unlike other portables of this size, the Z88 has no facility for storing data on cassette tape or disk drive. The only way you can hang onto your data is to buy Sir Clive's EPROM cartridges and save essential data there.

FUTURE EXPANSION

The company is providing a Z80 expansion bus for future expansion, for which an enterprising third-party manufacturer would certainly be well-advised to consider a disk drive of some description. A disk drive using this interface that reads and writes data in IBM PC format, would be a way of adding a great deal more to the value of the system.

As it stands, the Z88 is a somewhat limited portable with some impressive-looking applications and an ambitious design. Whether it's really worth the £200 asking price will come to light in a month or two when users all over the country start trying to communicate with a host of printers, modems and PCs. If the Z88 can pass that test, then it may well live up to its publicity. However, that will be difficult as Sir Clive and his Cambridge Computer company have set themselves a tall order. By promising, and taking orders for all kinds of add-ons, communications systems and even a modem, Sir Clive seems to have set himself up for a fall.

At press time in April, the company has not shipped a single Z88, let along any add-ons for it. If it has not begun shipping the machines in volume by the time you read this, Cambridge Computer and the Z88 could fall victim to the so-called 'QL syndrome', in which cheques are taken from customers up to six months before goods are delivered.

That would be a real shame as the Z88 definitely looks promising and if supported properly could be a great success. Sir Clive must make sure that it doesn't suffer the kind of delivery shortfalls that occurred in the latter days of Sinclair Research. We can only wish him the best of luck.

(Simon N Goodwin owns the copyright to this review. Please visit http://simon.mooli.org.uk to find original articles and updates, much new material and his contact details.)

SINCLAIR'S Z88 - PANDORA'S BOX?

SINCLAIR RIDES AGAIN

Sir Clive Sinclair has launched a £230 portable computer, the Z88. Contrary to rumours, it won't run Spectrum software, but it is an interesting beast, nonetheless. The machine comes from a new company, CAMBRIDGE COMPUTER, but it's the product of almost a decade of development work.

Tech Tipster Simon Goodwin has had a brief 'play' with a prototype Z88, and reports his findings. He also analyses Sinclair's ability to 'bounce back' from apparent disaster, as chronicled in The Sinclair Story in earlier issues of CRASH. This is not the first time Sir Clive has shed his staff, and his name, to make a fresh start in the gadget business...

GENESIS

Uncle Clive has been plugging the idea of a portable machine since he first began making computers - in fact, his first computer concept, the NewBrain, was a portable machine. That was originally developed in 1978 by his old firm, SINCLAIR RADIONICS. Later it was sold off to NEWBURY LABORATORIES, who launched it to an indifferent world in 1982.

As RADIONICS collapsed at the end of the seventies, Clive Sinclair set up a new firm, SCIENCE OF CAMBRIDGE, with Chris Curry, a star employee from his previous firm. When RADIONICS finally bit the dust, SCIENCE OF CAMBRIDGE was renamed twice - first to SINCLAIR COMPUTERS and then to SINCLAIR RESEARCH. No-one was the slightest bit surprised at this, as SCIENCE OF CAMBRIDGE advertisements looked exactly like their earlier RADIONICS counterparts. The Sinclair link had been obvious all along.

RECURRENT THEMES

Clive has now sold his surname to AMSTRAD, but that doesn't stop him putting CLIVE SINCLAIR (without the 'Sir') in large type at the top of the first page of the Z88 brochure. The leaflet follows the usual Sinclair format, just as the new company name follows on from previous titles.

CAMBRIDGE COMPUTER seems to be run on something of a shoestring. The Z88 was first revealed at a lunch for journalists at Sir Clive's house in London. Two days later a prospective customer arrived at the firm's Which Computer Show stand, and asked the name of the Sales Director. He was told, apologetically that they hadn't got one!

Chris Curry has evidently been impressed by the ease with which Sinclair has kept the ball rolling from one firm to another. Curry set up his own company in 1979 - ACORN COMPUTERS - and he duly left Uncle Clive after the ZX-80, to work full-time on his own. ACORN, like RADIONICS and SINCLAIR RESEARCH, had its ups and downs and was eventually bailed out by OLIVETTI. Curry abandoned ship, but he's still in the game - he's the man behind the Red Box add-ons which we reviewed in the Christmas Special!

MORE PRE-HISTORY

SCIENCE OF CAMBRIDGE avoided portable machines at first. They produced a tiny bare-board computer called the MK14, and then the ZX-80 - the first useful-looking computer to sell for under £100. The design of the Spectrum ROM is closely allied to that of the ZX-80, with the ZX-81-which actually was useful - as an intermediate step between the two machines.

In 1980 we were told that the ZX-80 "would be linked to a flat-screen display." in May of 1981 Sinclair upgraded his promise, announcing a version of the ZX-81 with a "four or five inch flat screen", scaled up from the RADIONICS pocket TV display... It never turned up - even in prototype form.

In 1983 the QL was planned as a go-anywhere machine, with space for a column of U2 batteries along the back of the case. Portability went out of the window in the rush to get something onto the shelves, as the bottom began to drop out of the micro market.

GENESIS REVISITED

A design recognisably similar to that of the Z88 was born early in 1984, partly in an attempt to salvage ideas left over from the development of the QL and the LC-3. The low-cost LC-3 was the first, unreleased 'Super-Spectrum'. It was scrapped in 1982, when a follow-up didn't seem necessary, and SINCLAIR RESEARCH turned to grander designs.

The details of the planned portable were published in February 1985, and it was scheduled for launch 'in 1985'. At this stage the machine was based around the Spectrum design, with a Z80 processor and support for Spectrum software. Built-in business packages were promised, along with 'bank-switched' plug-in memory cartridges. SA 'proper light-up display', again derived from the pocket TV, was considered essential.

"Liquid Crystal is rubbish", Sir Clive explained. "Nobody pursuing that avenue is getting anywhere. Nobody in the world has an answer to the flat display problem - except us."

PANDORA'S BOX

After a massive development effort, Sinclair engineers did manage to scale-up the Micro vision display, but the result was not judged a great success. The new screen used a combination of lenses and mirrors to project a picture in the air between the lid and the base of the prototype machine. The idea was ingenious, and it worked after a fashion - but it was heavy, greedy for power, fragile, and ill-suited to mass-production and that's being kind!

This machine was dubbed 'Pandora' inside the company. Like that of the 'Loki' proposal which I demolished in August 1986, this name was a rather obscure joke. According to ancient myth, Pandora was a character who made the mistake of opening a box in which all the evils of the world were trapped, along with one more benign quantity - hope. Opening the Pandora computer case could have released just about anything!

Under the terms of his sell-out, Sinclair is required to offer future computer designs to AMSTRAD. One look at Pandora was enough to put them off - they gave Sinclair permission to go it alone.

Z88 HARDWARE

The Z88 has shed most of the outer trappings of 'Pandora'. It retains the cartridges and Z80 processor, but has ended up with a liquid crystal display, bought in from the Japanese. The display is fairly clear, with dark blue letters on a grey background, but I wouldn't like to use it for long. It's very short and wide and the characters are much smaller than those of previous portable computers (like the EPSOM HX-20 and the TANDY 100). It's quite good as LCD displays go, but it's still sluggish, 'dotty' and cramped. In view of his earlier comments, I have a suspicion that Sinclair doesn't like it much either.

The LCD screen rules out Spectrum compatibility at a stroke, with its slow refresh rate and wide, short 64 x 640 pixel format. The word-processor uses eight 80 column text lines, with margins containing a menu and a 'page map' showing the page layout, with one dot for each character.

The Sinclair deal with AMSTRAD has been suggested as another reason for the Z88's lack of Spectrum compatibility, but I think that argument should take second place to the practical considerations. The Z88 has no output for a conventional 'CRT' display, and it seems unlikely that one will materialise - LCD and CAT display circuits have very little in common.

The Z88 weighs less than two pounds, and is about the site of an A4 pad. It feels light, but sturdy. It runs on four Walkman batteries, apparently for 20 hours, with about a year's 'stand-by' power when you're not actually using the machine, but still want it to retain its memory contents. These are Sinclair's battery life figures, and anyone who has owned a C-5, Black Watch or Cambridge programmable calculator will view them with suspicion.

The keyboard is weird in design, but quite easy to use in practice. It is a continuous sheet of plastic, with raised keys. The material at the side of each key is thin, so that only the key you press moves as you type. Although it seems simpler, I prefer this keyboard to that of the Spectrum Plus and the QL. It's silent, which is a bit disconcerting, but as usual Sinclair can think of a good reason for every deviation from normality - he points out that it's much easier to hear yourself think in a room full of Z88 owners than it is in a typing pool!

I type for a living, and I'd be quite happy to use the Z88 keyboard - but this is a very subjective judgement, and I'd advise you to have a go before ordering a Z88, especially if you're already an experienced typist. Journalists that I've spoken to come out about 50:50 for and against the Z88 keyboard.

Z88 SYSTEM

It seems that - as usual for a Sinclair machine - the Z88 has been launched long before it is ready. The prototype was running a neat Word Processor package, but the spreadsheet, database and diary software were nowhere to be seen. This software will have to be uncommonly reliable - there's not much point having batteries that can preserve data for a year if the software goes haywire and scrambles things, or locks the machine up, every few days.

The Z88 will run BBC BASIC - a dialect much-lauded by those who know more about fashion than they do about computer science. BBC BASIC is faster and more expressive than ZX BASIC - but it's less friendly.

A version of BBC BASIC for the Z80 processor has been available for several years, so it should not take long to get the core of it running on the Z88. It will be interesting to see how much support we get for the paged memory and LCD graphics. Will we be stuck with the 64K memory limit of other versions, on this machine which promises 'over 3 megabytes of instantly-addressable memory'?

The claims about the memory capacity of the Z88 should be taken with a pinch of salt. There are slots for three ROM or RAM cartridges at the front of the machine, and 32K and 128K cartridges are promised to be available with the first machines in April, with a 1 megabyte version coming 'soon'. That will be built around the 'wafer scale integration' ideas that have been kicking wound Sinclair's 'Metalab' for several years - but there's no sign yet of the £6 million needed to get those ideas into production.

The only standard interface is an RS-232 port, which allows access to modems, serial printers, and other computers at least in theory. RS-232 interfacing is a black art at the best of times, and Sinclair serial interfaces have a reputation for idiosyncrasy.

PROVISIONAL VERDICT

I enjoyed reading the Z88 brochure, and as usual I wanted to order one as soon as I'd finished. The design seems full of good ideas, but it's clearly not finished yet. CAMBRIDGE COMPUTER are talking about production levels of 10,000 machines a month, but this is a pretty meaningless figure, as it's the usual 'minimum order' quantity for mass-production of computers.

be pleased, but surprised, if Sinclair can sell Z88's in respectable numbers. EPSOM, NEC and TANDY have all attacked the A4 portable computer market and found slim pickings.

The appeal of a portable computer has been clear since XEROX came up with the idea of the Dynabook, long before the personal computer industry existed. The Z88 is a step in that direction, and will doubtless appeal to some people, but the product hardly lives up to the slogan, 'full-facility, no-compromise computing' at the moment.

It's especially sad that Spectrum compatibility has been ruled out, because that could have given the Z88 the mass-market appeal that it presently lacks. But Sinclair is still a man to watch, and - rest assured - CRASH will keep watching.

STOP PRESS... Amstrad have announced a Spectrum Plus Three. This will have one built-in disk drive in place of the Plus Twos cassette, and an operating system written by Locomotive Software, the firm's tame programming house. At the time of writing (early March) there's been no sight of a finished product, although that hasn't prevented less reputable magazines than CRASH from getting their crayons out.

The word is that boss Alan Sugar has given the development team until the end of March to sort out the design. We'll bring you all the facts, and intelligent analysis, as soon as the new machine materialises.

CLIVE'S NEW Z88

So what's this Z88 micro then? Well, it's the first thing Sir Clive has done since 'the troubles' and the Z88 is what Pandora portable turned into.

A portable computer has long been one of Clive Sinclair's most cherished ambitions.

The QL was going to be portable. One-Per-Desk was going to be (almost) portable.

But only the Spectrum was really portable, travelling from Cambridge to Brentwood in the back of Alan Sugar's truck.

And now here's the Z88.

Unveiled at the Which Computer? Show on February 17 to muted wonderment, this 21lb, A4-sized technogimmick is in the best Sinclair traditions. It's black. It's cheap. And it's not finished.

The main features of this first sugar-free Sinclair (well, Cambridge Computer, ackcheloi are the super-twist liquid-crystal display, the Z80 processor, the keyboard, the built in software, the storage modules and the price. The main non-features are the tape port, the compatibility, and the extra software. And, I suspect, the battery life.

TWIST AND SHOW IT

Let's start with the super-twist LCD. Sinclair has long been less than ardent fans of the technology. In the late '70s, they published a 'consumer report' saying that nobody liked LCDs and as a result the new Sinclair LED calculators would beat the likes of Casio handsdown. Ahem.

However, the new super-twist is really rather good. Legible, low power and fast. Even Clive Sinclair likes it. From the brief glimpse obtained at the Which Computer Show, it does seem that it ain't half bad. Super-twist, by the way, derives from the way in which the liquid crystal molecules contort themselves to block the light when a voltage is applied.

The custom chip (there are only four chips in total - like the old ZX81 really) which manages the display goes overboard a bit. Hardware windowing, sophisticated scrolling, hardware support for mixed text and graphics... If only that sort of thing had gone into a games machine instead of a business LCD micro. Sigh.

The Z80 processor itself is a super low-power version. The magic letters in this case are CMOS, a kind of electrics that takes very little current and work rather well. Of late, CMOS Z80's have been getting cheaper, too. And it's completely compatible with older, thirstier versions.

The keyboard is a bit strange. Billed as 'silent', it appears to be made out of a harder Sinclair latex than the Spectrum. It takes a bit of getting used to, but isn't actively finger-hitting bad.

So who's going to buy it? Well, the built-in software is a real give away of who Sinclair hopes will buy the beast. An integrated word processor and spreadsheet tops the list, followed by a diary, alarm clock, simple database and a calculator. There's also (whisper it) BBC Basic. No games. And at launch, which is the basis of this little article, it wasn't finished.

The key to the operation of the whole machine are the storage cartridges. These consist of Rom or Ram chips, encased in a black plastic box uncannily like microdrive, and which slot into the front of the machine. As many as 3 Mbytes can be stored in boxes.

And everything is powered by four Walkman-sized batteries. 20 hours of working are promised. Sceptics remember the 20 mile range of the C5 which proved to be closer to 5. There is no facility provided for rechargeable batteries, although something could be fudged by the mains adaptor port...

And the price. £230 to you? Bear in mind the massive 32K of Ram, and the complete lack of a tape port. Bear in mind that nobody's actually got one yet. And then think about the QL.

Me, I think I'll wait...