The Jackito Tactile Digital Assistant

Posted by Fraser Lovatt on 23 July 2004 at 5:06 pm | Tagged as: Platforms, Portable

Billing itself as more of a TDA than a PDA, the Jackito Tactile Digital Assistant has a user interface that’s operated by your fingers and thumbs.

Moving away from the traditional stylus interface means that the Jackito has a different form factor than the usual hand-helds out there – the Jackito has a landscape orientation, and it’s operated by your thumbs at the sides.

The display is unique in that it can read two simultaneous touch points – try poking the touch pad on your laptop with two fingers and you’ll see why this is a good thing.

The device is manufactured by a Novinit, a Paris-based company created in 1999 and is an attempt to get away from the “scaled-down PC” mentality of many of the PDAs on the market.

Novinit’s TDA has no less than seven parallel processors, and features its own custom OS – it’ll be available with a choice of screens: black and white, colour and bistable. It seems to have just 2.5mb of user RAM though, but has two SD/MMC slots for expansion.

At US$600 (€490) it’s a bit on the pricey side, but I’m sure you’ll be sat next to an early adopter with one on a plane soon.

Jackito