There are now so many computer hardware, software and related products on the market, it is becoming extremely difficult to make a buying decision.
Take a simple example. You want to purchase a new Personal Computer. You have some idea about what you want. Let's say you're looking for a Pentium PC, with at least 8Mb of memory. You also have an idea of how much you want to spend.
So, what do you do next. Most people purchase a number of computer magazines, read articles and refer to the frequently published Buyers Guides. It's not long before you've torn out 20 pages from various magazines in an attempt to try to narrow down your choice. You'll probably make a buying decision on a subset of the information you identified. You've most likely also suffered from "information overload" in that it becomes extremely difficult to decide what to buy when you are reading about so many products that you do NOT want to buy! What PC? Pages combines What PC? magazine's prestigious Buyers Guide with Mobile Software's powerful database search software, allowing Psion 3a users the ability to access up to date information based on personal criteria. Every month, from Mid-April 1996, the magazine's cover CD-ROM will include a number of sections of the Buyers Guide, together with updates to previously published ones. For example, the May 1996 edition of the magazine will include the Desktop PCs, Notebook PCs and Laser Printers sections. The June 1996 edition will contain an updated Desktop PCs section, plus a number of software sections. Psion users will be able to download them to their Psions and search the databases against their personal criteria. Furthermore, they will be able to interrogate What PC? Pages when they're actually at the retailer. No more thumbing through those pages torn out from PC magazines!
So, let's look at the process. Firstly, select search criteria from menus .....
You can see here that we've defined multiple search criteria. What PCs are there in the database in the price range £1,500 to £1,999, that have a Pentium processor and a minimum of 8Mb of memory. Furthermore, in this example, we only want to see any such PCs manufactured by the 3 companies specified.....
A simple search on the database displays a summary of all PCs meeting the defined criteria .....
Finally, you can look at detailed information about any of the PCs .....
In order to produce What PC? Pages, Mobile Software receive the revised What PC? Buyers Guide tables, in electronic format, every month. The Mobile Pages database generation process has now been refined to the extent that we are able to produce new monthly editions of What PC? Pages in less than an hour per month. If you have a requirement to make appropriate subsets of your business or corporate database available via Mobile Pages, perhaps to be used by your employees, please contact Mobile Software to discuss your requirements further.
A demonstration version of What PC? Pages is available here and also from the CIX mobile_pages conference.
View the What PC? Pages Press Release