Sharp PC-E500S manual?

[rprosperi]

(06-11-2024 05:07 PM)vaklaff Wrote:  But now I can’t get another question from my head: Why didn’t Sharp sell the PC-E500S in the English speaking countries? Were they just testing waters in continental Europe, with poor results? Or were the UK and NA already taken by a strong competing product? Or had Sharp already a better product in their queue? Anything else?

I can answer for US, not sure about UK and other English-speaking areas. At the time (early 90's) Sharp Electronics Corp (SEC - the US based sales subsidiary of Sharp Corp.) was going through tremendous growth and success with retail sales of calculators, PDAs, Faxes and related office electronics, and to focus it's efforts there, basically lost all of its skills (read sales & mktg people) related to solution selling with VARs, system integrators, etc. and this product division felt the PC-E500, PC-E500s, and the later pocket computers could not sell in retail channels in the qtys. demanded by Sharp Corp. in order to bring the product to market here. The established pocket computer VARs, selling mostly financial products based on older pocket computers, e.g. PC-1270, collectively sold enough units for SEC to continue carrying them, with essentially no sales/mktg support, so these were continued until about 2000.

Bottom line is the older pocket computers sold well as platforms for 3rd parties to sell solutions on and were hardly sold in retail at all. When the focus shifted to massive retail success, the newer model pocket computers were left behind.