Poqet PC - Conclusion

Conclusion

The Poqet PC was one of the first subnotebooks to exist in the marketplace, and still today is one of the smallest, although it is beaten by the HP 200LX. It was immediately recognized as a milestone in portable computing when PC Magazine awarded the Poqet PC development team (Ian Cullimore, John Fairbanks, Leroy Harper, Shinpei Ichikawa, Stav Prodromou) its coveted Technical Excellence Award for 1989. Interestingly, the same device that PC World called "one of the 50 greatest gadgets of the last 50 years" had a very short lifespan, from only about 1989-1994. After Poqet was bought by Fujitsu, the Poqet was soon axed. For a short time Poqet value declined, with the onset of Windows CE. A similar decline in HP 200LX demand also occurred after the introduction of HP Windows CE machines. However, despite the new machines' power, their operating system soon proved to be inefficient. The Poqets and HP 'LX' DOS machines became very high in demand, and recently an HP 200LX sold for $182 on eBay. Poqets also are in fairly high demand, but fetch somewhat lower prices. A Cherry Hill, NJ business, Disks 'n' Data, once had a stock of Classics and Pluses. As the owner of the store, Jerry Tessler, put it: "I sold them all in twenty minutes." Unlike running WinCE, running DOS in near-standard specifications meant that everything from Lotus 1-2-3 to Zork worked as expected.