Sharp electronic organizers with the IC card slot (Wizard OZ/IQ/PA/PI series)

[Akuji]

Today I'd like to talk about the variations of the first Western Sharp organizer with the IC card slot, the OZ/IQ-7000. As most of you probably know, the OZ line was sold in the USA, while the IQ line was offered in the rest of the world.

Sharp introduced the OZ-7000 in the States in October 1988. Around the same time, the company released the IQ-7000 in the Canadian and UK markets (I don't have the exact dates, unfortunately). In Europe, the IQ-7000 was announced no later than January 1989.

Pictured below are four variants of the 7000 organizer. With OZ-7000, which was promoted under the "Wizard" brand name (as "Wizard of the OZ"), everything is quite simple. The IQ-7000 on the top-right is the standard model for the continental European, Australian, and Hong Kong markets, and it's called simply the "Electronic Organizer." The bottom-left is the variant sold in the UK. Note the "IQ" in capital letters - Sharp specifically emphasized "Intelligence Quotient" in the branding of the organizers in that market only. Finally, although the bottom-right organizer has a different model number, IQ-7100M, in reality, is the same IQ-7000 with localized interface in several European languages. It was released in the middle of 1989.
There is also Canadian IQ-7000 available in the wild. Its packaging is almost the same as the standard (top-right) one, apart from the absence of the German inscriptions on the box. The organizer itself is completely identical.





In addition to packaging, the differences in the organizer variants also relate to the branding on the devices themselves.





It's worth noting that similar regional differences apply to all subsequent models released by Sharp in the west.

P.S. Since we're talking about the 7000 model here, let me show you some photos of a Taiwanese knock-off that I've found online. Its developers were definitely inspired by Sharp's product: