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CHIBA, JAPAN -- NEC has provided the public with a first glimpse at its upcoming personal digital assistant. The company has unveiled a prototype of the device here at the World PC Expo show, taking place just outside of Tokyo.

Few details were offered about the PDA, which was on show as part of a demonstration of new global positioning system and wireless LAN Compact Flash cards. But the prototype device was running the Windows CE operating system, and featured a color display of about four inches.

Under the display, the device had a large button with up/down movement and left/right movement. On either side of that were two smaller buttons.

In addition to the Compact Flash slot, the prototype also had a Secure Digital memory card slot and a button similar to the "jog-dial" key on Sony's Clie PDA.

Coming Soon?

"We're planning to ship it at the end of this year, both in Japan and the rest of the world," says Susumu Sakamoto, a spokesperson for NEC. He wouldn't reveal additional details about the device except to say it is based on an Intel StrongArm processor.

NEC announced its intention to enter the PDA market in July this year. In doing so, it becomes the latest major Japanese electronics manufacturer to attempt to stake a claim to a portion of the expanding market. Earlier this year Toshiba unveiled its first PDA and Sony got into the market last year with its Clie PDA.

Also this week, Palm and Handspring unveiled new handheld computers. Handheld unveiled two new Visor PDAs, one of which features 16MB of memory.

Palm launched the M125, the company's first 33-MHz PDA in its M100 family. The M125, priced at $249, is based on Motorola's Dragonball VZ 33-MHz processor, the fastest processor for PDAs running the Palm OS.

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