Portable computers were all the rage last year. You couldn't really call yourself a computer manufacturer if you didn't have one - either the Tandy/Panasonic/Epson-style 'lap' computer with a built-in flat screen, or a 'real' computer with a conventional display, built-in disk drive, and a carrying handle.

Commodore went for the latter approach with the SX-64. Basically it's a box containing a C64, one floppy disk drive, and a five-inch display with a handle-cum-stand and a cable-connected keyboard that clips on to the front to double as a cover.

Sounds ok so far? Well, there are two ways of looking at the SX. You can consider it in isolation simply as another computer, in which case it's an expensive C64 with some extras and some omissions.

Or you can consider it as something to be used by someone - and then you'll be asking 'who', 'when', 'where' and 'why'. And to confuse the latter assessment there are a couple of bugs in the unquent. Like, it costs £895. Like it has only one disk and the standard 6510 microprocessor from the C64, so it doesn't really compare too well as a business computer. Like it has joystick and cartridge ports but no cassette interface, so it doesn't look like a complete home computer system either.

And what's the SX-64? It's a C64 with a 1541 disk in a box, with a built-in screen and the electronics inside the cabinet rather than the keyboard.

Commodore has a different view: or more accurately, a number of different views. It's the "Commodore Portable SX-64 Colour Computer" says the manual, calling it the "Commodore Executive 64" elsewhere with a schizophrenic mien that as we'll see characterises the whole thing. "On of the best values in the home computer industry," it continues; but isn't something called the 'Executive 64' going to be more of a business computer?

Ah well, "the SX-64 is portable computing in the office, home, hotel room or at any location where mains power is available". So it's for everyone, y'see: that's what the PR agency says. But hang on, here's the brochure: "The Commodore SX-64 portable colour computer allows the businessman to truly take his work with him where he goes," it opens. So it's a business computer.

Or maybe not. Paragraph two: "If you're a busy executive keeping a diary, a scientist making notes about experiments, a salesman on a sales call, an on-side engineer, a reporter, an auditor, an accountant, or even a hobbyist who travels, this portable system is a must". Seven to one: must be a business computer.

Ah-ha, the price list: yes, at £895 it's a business computer. So, down to business.

A big box containing the usual quantity of protective polystyrene: embedded therein is an SX, a mains cable (no plug), a keyboard cable (18 ins of it), handbook, cut-price flock-wallpaper handbag (for cables?), and some freebie software.

The thing is basically a deep and surprisingly heavy steel box - weighs 10.5kg, which isn't too bad: measures just over 400mm square by around 135mm (Say 15 x 15 x 5 ins), so for the average purchaser (whoever that is) it shouldn't scrape on the ground. Colour scheme muted elephant grey and matt black, with a few frilly bits in blue and silver.

Carry handle is a nice piece of work, thick and ribbed: you get a good grip on it and it doubles as a stand - ratchet swivel with simple but effective locking mechanism on each pivot. Doesn't really raise the screen high enough for crickfree viewing, though.

Keyboard unclips from the front (spring clips hold it on, feel less than 100 per cent mighty but keyboard never slipped off while we were carting the review model around) to reveal dinky little screen - 5in diagonal. Also there: one disk drive helpfully labelled 'drive 0', one disk-rive sized gap labelled 'storage', one spring-clipped panel labelled with the CBM logo in sexy silver (opens to reveal display controls and reset button. What's a reset button, daddy?)

After the multi-cable hassles of assembling an ordinary C64 system, it's magic to get up and running by making two connections - mains into back, keyboard to the front via solid 25-pin plugs and usefully long, flexible cable. The keyboard can stay attached when clipped back on for transit, but then the plug juts out a bit.

The keyboard is a restyled version of the C64's, with all 67 keys in the same layout. The keytops are smaller and the whole thing looks a lot more modern - very European, cleaner and clearer, with the keytop characters fashionably offset to the top left corner of the keys and the number keys printed with both the Control and CBM colours. 'Control' is spelt out, too, rather than being 'CTRL': so it 'Clear', but 'Insert' stays as 'Inst' for some reason. It's physically smaller than the C64 keyboard, but in terms of getting your fingers on to the keytops that's no problem.

No 'on' light to show you that the thing's working if the screen has blown, though. At least there's one on the Shift Lock.

The disk is obviously a repackaged 1541 for 5.25in 170KB floppies; comes complete with 1541's clunk-click latch and formatting characters. No improvement on 1541 speed. The 'storage' hole is a joke: may be useful for the leads in transit, but you can't fit disks into it unless they're out of their card overcoat (not recommended); the manual won't fit either, and it's too deep for pencils and too tight for buns (sandwiches might fit).

The display (reputedly a Sony screen) is a colour monitor - no watching Football Focus or Dallas on it. Displays the C64's 16 colours, 255 screen/border combinations, 25 40-character rows (but can scroll over 240 characters), bit-mapped for 320 x 200 pixels' worth of hi-res graphics. Text looks a bit dotty on it, and there's a slight but noticeable refresh flicker: but colours reproduce well, and hi-res graphics can look very crisp.

Start-up display is the Vic-style dark blue characters on white background with cyan border. The border isn't proportionally as large as on the C64 because the screen surround chops off the edges: gives the illusion of a near screen-size display area, but the sharp edge looks better anyhow.

Open the dinky little door and there's dinky little controls for volume (yes, the SX has its own speaker - pretty good one too, considerable loudness and little distortion), brightness, contrast, colour balance and vertical hold. Plus two fine-tuning screwdriver holes for contrast and brightness, which makes up for the limited turn range on the knobs.

Any then there's the reset button. Tiny, discreet, unexplained. On most computers there's a reset button which does the same as Run/Stop, and restore followed by NEW, but this isn't one. No-one at Commodore could tell us what it's for; only effect seems to be spinning the disk. For emergency hang-ups? Surely Commodore isn't admitting that the 1541 is prone to hang?

Atop there's the cartridge slot, clean and easy insertion through small flush-fitting spring-loaded doors. All the C64 cartridges we tried worked on; they look a bit weird sticking out of the top, but it's better than fiddling around the back.

Where you'll find a big finned heat disperser below a neat strip of standard C64 sockets - two joystick ports, DIN sockets for audio/video and serial, user port, mains lead, 1.5A fuse, chunky power switch.

Obvious absentee: cassette port. That's the major technical difference between the C64 and the SX. Not only have all the tape electronics and the edge connector been omitted, the Kernal's been modified to kill all reference to it. Like the SX gives 'ILLEGAL DEVICE NUMBER' when you try to read from or write to device 1, the cassette.

Instead, there's a new meaning to the instant-load method of pressing Shifted RUN/Stop: it produced LOAD":*",8 and RUN to load and run the first thing the SX finds on disk. Note that they didn't amend the Kernal enough to make the disk rather than tape the default default - try typing LOAD "FILENAME" and you'll get the cheery illegal device message; you still have to laboriously spell it out as LOAD "FILENAME",8.

That kind of thing is a bit of a shame, since there has been some messing around in the Kernal - opening message promotes SX-64 BASIC C2.0, not COMMODORE BASIC V2; some tidying up to cursor handling and jumps has been done, and there's a whole new routine at 58579-58588 in what was formerly empty memory. It's only short, but we haven't yet been able to figure out what it does.

No other Kernal changes, and none to Basic. A real missed opportunity for simplified disk handling in particular; the SX is stuck with Basic 2.0's protracted OPEN and PRINT# disk controls rather than the shorter and easier commands offering in Basic 4.0 from the 700 (if it still exists) and the 8000s.

True, there is the DOS Wedge on the TEST/DEMO disk supplied; sits on the cassette buffer, gives two-key disk directory (non-destructive) and file load. But it still has to be loaded; it could have been Kernalled. Ditto the disk copying programs supplied (one for single-disk copying, one for twin drives). There's still no quick 'n easy formatting.

That TEST/DEMO also includes a 'how to use' text display (which says very little other than to name the utilities it provides) and a few SX demos (which to our mind didn't really make the most of the SX's facilities).

The other freebies to sell you on the SX are three packages and a disk full of six games. The games are so-so to good. The fruit machine has good graphics but some oddities (like you can hold a winning line; doesn't happen that way at our local!) and anyhow fruit machine games are boring. The text-only mini-Adventure serves as an intro to the genre (120 rooms, 53 objects to collect; but again some inconsistencies). The 3D maze is ok; so is the 2D Patience.

Average arcade action comes as a very ordinary 2D depth charge game; much better is a travelling gunsight plus laser cannons to zap the Imperial fighters from space (really difficult at level 9).

The games may not be great; how about the packages, worth £210 according to Commodore? Well, there's Precision's well-known Easy Script word processor, now branded by Commodore. Not at all a bad WP package, with many top-notch facilities including tabs, search-and-replace/delete, mail-merge for personalising form letters. It's by no means the easiest C64 work processor to use, though, and you'll find more facilities and more friendliness from other WP software on the C64... but then you'll pay extra for it.

Future Finance is a financial planning program producing cashflows and gross and net profitability forecasts from your input of up to fifteen sales items, fifteen purchase heads, and 30 nominal (expense) items. If you need more than that, you can split the model into different parts and later consolidate them. Various output report formats for different needs.

Problem? It's slow, awkward (especially on consolidations) and inflexible to use (for instance, you can't edit a mistyped input - you have to do the whole entry again). One of the many decent spreadsheets for the C64 will be easier and better... but then you'll pay extra again.

Anagram's Easy Stock is probably the best of the three is that it's as good as most inventory packages on the C64. Takes a while to define your stock file, but thereafter works well; book orders in and out, see stock-lows and slow movers highlighted, produce stock movement analyses (only two sales analysis codes though), do profitability assessments and stocktakes (including an override to alter stock quantity for pilferage and breakages without affecting values of sales and purchases), raise the price across the board by a percentage, and so on. Several good and useful reporting options using all or part of the file, too.

Major omission: no parts explosion for manufacturers, but then it's obviously aimed at retailers. Only significant complaints, then, are the thing's inflexibility (no tailoring is possible, like it won't cope with your giving selective discounts on selected lines to selected customers) and the use of lower-case letters in the display - may look nice on a big screen, but too small really for the mini display.

The SX handbook is a classic Commodore opus. Lie-flat spiral binding, 174 pages plus two blank ones labelled 'MEMO' and the useless bound-in 'Quick Reference Card' - all printed on that glossy paper which turns into superglue when you spill coffee on to it.

Inside there's a mish-mash of reprinted and/or lightly rewritten sections from the C64 handbook and the 1541 manual. Not very well mish-mashed, either: random access files and block read/write on page 27? In a section called 'Getting Started'?

Much hilarity too in 'Expanding your system'. Has anyone seen a C64 IEEE Interface Card in any Commodore dealers? Or the Z-80 cartridge with CP/M? Or the Speech Module?! Or the Superexpander 64? Or the modem that "let's you use your telephone to connect your Executive 64 to other computers and informative retrieval services"?

Or a Prestel link or networking on the Pet emulator? All promised in the brochure...

The fashion for portables with a 'real' display (a TV-like CRT monitor capable of showing enough characters at a time to be useful) and a 'real' keyboard (with typewriter-style keys rather than the Spectrum/PC Jr 'Chiclet' push buttons) was all started by the (largely self-styled) microcomputer industry guru Adam Osborne.

He sold a lot of Osborne 1s before he went bust. That computer was/is surprisingly unadventurous technically, with a conventional eight-bit micro in there along with two floppy disk drives and a tiny eye-straining screen in a bulky and ugly box (personal opinion - some people like it).

But it was/is portable (especially if you want to develop your biceps). It was/is complete - all you need is a printer. It had/has a proper keyboard, a proper screen, a proper disk operating system. And the price was/is really attractive, particularly as it includes a lot of free software.

Since the Osborne's launch, though, portables have come a long way. Displays are bigger and better, the virtually indestructible Sony micro-floppies are being used, 16-bit processors are now de rigeur, compatibility with the IBM PC (or more specifically with the huge amount of good-quality software available for the PC) is the norm, the styling has infinitely improved.

But who needs a portable computer anyway? It costs money to build something that's robust enough to stand being lugged around, and there are all kinds of technical and ergonomic compromises that have to be made in manufacturing a physically compact unit. Are there that many people who need a computer to take with them whenever they leave the office or their home?

In fact, it looks as though most portables for the business world aren't actually ported very much at all; they tend to sit on a desk more or less all their working lives. Not unlike a conventional non-portable computer, in fact.

Now, there is probably a case for arguing that some business people will want to take a computer home for out-of-hours work. Travelling salesmen and suchlike use a portable for instant recording of visits and (hopefully) orders, perhaps with a phone link back to the head office computer to down-line the data collected. It's certainly useful for software developers to have a luggable computer: they tend to want to work wherever they happen to be. And there's at least one computer journalist makes a habit of getting up people's noses by sitting on the front row of press conferences clacking away at a portable computer.

What's more, there probably is also a market for a small, neat, compact and complete home computer - everything you need in one box with just one mains lead, as an alternative to the spaghetti of wiring that connects a plethora of small boxes to each other and to your TV set.

The appropriate comparison could be with those portable stereos with clip-on detachable speakers on the side of a compact unit containing amp, tuner and tape deck: you may not get as much in the way of hi-fi quality as with a component set-up, and you'll probably omit some things like a record deck. But in return you have an easy-to-use simply-connected unit that's physically small, which delivers pretty good quality and at a pretty low price.

On the plus side it's quite a nice piece of design work. It looks quite good, feels solid, is heavy but fairly comfortable to carry, has no irritating reflective surfaces.

There is the video-out connection for attaching a full-size monitor, but in any case the little display is pretty legible. The small size of the characters gets in the way of comprehension only on some 'curved' letters like capital 'S'.

Then there's the keyboard. Styling is ok, if you accept that any portable with typewriter-style keys isn't going to leave a lot of room on the actual keyboard for considerate extras like space to rest your palm. The styling of the SX's keys (including dished keytops and slightly raked keyboard - just what ergonomists recommend) is better than the standard C64's, and their labelling (including the extra colours accessed by the CBM key) is both clear and more helpful.

On the debit side, the keyboard is much too light: a solid plate of lead in it wouldn't have added much to the overall weight, and it would have made the keyboard feel a lot more solid (a psychological consideration, maybe) while stopping it sliding around at the slightest touch (entirely practical).

And the key action is awful - far too light, far too clacky, generally imprecise. Our spacebar felt like the spring had failed at one end, so it didn't register at all if you hit the left side; hope that doesn't happen too often on other keys.

Then there's the two real problems, the things that confuse the SX's identity comprehensively: cassette and disk. Providing a disk full of games would point to a home-computer appeal... or maybe not, since the games are average at best. Commodore could have given away some much better offerings if it wanted to impress the domestic punter: how about the International Soccer cartridge?

Nor does it provide any of the facilities that home users would have found so helpful for programming - no extra sprite and sound commands on disk or cartridge, for instance.

Since tape will be the cheap and obvious home-computer storage and program distribution method for some time to come it looks as though the SX isn't a home computer. Not for the average buyer, anyhow, even if said average hacker can stump up the necessary readies.

The business person and the software developer are the other candidates among the SX's potential market. Both need disk, and indeed there is a disk... but what a disk! It's the 1541, for a start; a temperamental little number, to say the least.

And only one drive. For serious work (notably to take back-up copies and for handling applications that require both a data file and a program disk available all the time) you really need two. You could attach another 1541 to the serial port and use it as device no. 9, but that rather removes one of the points about a complete portable system - and those 1541s are notoriously sensitive: you can't lug them around like you can the C64.

There is in theory a DX-64 too - 'SX' presumably meaning 'Single-disk Executive computer', with 'DX' being the 'Double-disk' sibling. The manual talks about it, and all the 1983 PR from Commodore suggested a twin-disk portable as the main product with the single-disk version being the el cheapo model for the impecunious. But the DX isn't here yet, and we hear that it never will be - reportedly Commodore has found it really difficult to get two 1541-style drives into the box.

Commodore presumably sees a business market for the SX, which is why it gives away three business-orientated packages with it. Well, the word processor and the financial planner are ok... but there are probably better options available commercially.

Anagram's stock control package is a good piece of C64 software, but it's a curious choice of freebie: a file-orientated application like inventory really shows up the limitations of speed, capacity and overall flexibility that the C64-plus-1541 combo necessarily imposes. Besides, stock control isn't the most commonly required of business tasks for microcomputers; a sales ledger with VAT computation would surely have appealed to a wider range of people.

As a software developer's tool - and for magazine reviewers and programmers! - the SX-64 isn't all that bad, however. Particularly if what you need is literally a portable C64, a machine that you can take anywhere use to develop or review software intended for the average £200 Commodore 64.

There are no 'toolkit' facilities built into the C64, though; and nor is there a freebie disk full of those little essentials that would make programming the thing a lot easier. Why not a cut-down Programmer's Aid on disk?

Maybe Commodore doesn't see a software development market. But with the proviso that cassette would be useful, the other deficiencies and drawbacks pale into irrelevance against the fact that the SX is an ideal homework machine for people working with C64s; for us the SX-6 would be ideal.

But there you come up against the major problem - the price tag. At £895 the thing is just too expensive to be a home computer, but it's also too expensive to be a straight portable C64. Using your home TV you can have a C64 with a 1541 for about £400; for not much more than half the SX's price you can get a decent monitor as well. The freebie software isn't worth the difference.

The word is that Commodore wants so few sales that the limited production facilities it has in Japan for the thing won't be embarrassingly overstretched. Seen in that light, the SX-64 is probably a market research and R&D exercise which will allow Commodore to get some idea of what the punters want and try out some packaging techniques to deliver that sometime in the future.

The SX is a neatly packaged and highly-priced C64 with a 1541, loaded with all the deficiencies implied by that and also blessed with most of the virtues of the combination. But as it stands, the SX-64 doesn't really look like a computer for anyone in particular.

But when the price drops to £499, it'll be a Good Buy for software writers and maybe for business users with a really tight budget: when the DX appears at £895 the business market will really open up for it: when there's a faster CPU and more functions in ROM and a rewrite of the DOS and higher-capacity microfloppies or maybe a 5MB mini-Winchester for less than £1,500, it'll sell a million. Shame about the keyboard.

But anyhow, that's not the SX-64: that's the next-generation product for which the SX-64 looks like a such-it-and-see exercise.

Product:
Commodore SX-64

Description:
Portable C64 computer with integral single disk, screen, loudspeaker

Supplier:
Commodore Business Machines

Address:
675 Ajax Avenue
Slough
Berks SL1 (via dealers)

Telephone:
0752 74111

Summary:
Neat, quite clever; but schizophrenic pricing and specification

Price:
£895 (includes three packages)