In Need of a New Paradigm

Mobile computing has reached critical mass, and yet I have been disenchanted with coverage in BYTE and in other PC magazines regarding this major emerging product category for several years. You tend to treat mobile PCs as if they were desktop systems, but somehow less. In fact, they are very different, and it would be most helpful to judge them against a mobile paradigm. Yet with your desktop bias, you give short shrift to technologies that differentiate these smaller systems, even as you heap praise on all their desktop-like attributes. Take PCMCIA, for example. Yes, PCMCIAhas growing pains and compatibility problems today, but the topic also cries out for serious and continuous coverage, and except for fax/modem and network-adapter announcements, it is not getting that coverage from BYTE.

Frank Keresztes-Fischer

Brighton, MI

When eval uating portable computers, we use and heavily rate criteria that are important to mobile users. For instance, in the March lab report on portables, we evaluate size, weight, battery life, communications tools, and pointing devices. We also stress the importance of a portable's ability to connect to external monitors, its suitability for giving presentations, and availability of PCMCIA slots. Furthermore, we use a notebook computer as the baseline system when comparing benchmark results. --Eds.