Electronic card fad

Press, 25 January 1988, Page 20

Electronic card fad

The “Economist’s” Tokyo correspondent reports

This Christmas, Japan; next year, the world. Much of the gadgetry now on sale in Tokyo’s stores as year-end gifts will find its way into Western stockings in 1988.

The latest craze is for creditcard look-alikes that do surprising things. "Cardy,” for example, is a line of card-sized kits that house ballpoint pens, notepads and tiny rulers. The fad began with the telephone cards of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, colourful bits of plastic that can be used in telephone booths instead of cash. They come in thousands of different designs; 60 million have been sold in the past four yfears. So popular are they that Japan Railways launched its own versions. Several food distributors are experimenting with such conceits as the Coke card ajad the-

hamburger card. Cards have gone electronic, too, starting with the race to •build the ever-thinner card-sized calculator. One hot new seller is a different kind of telephone card. Made by Seiko and Casio, it stores 410 user-programmed telephone numbers, any of which can be recalled with the touch of a button. Similar electronic marvels teach their owners English. They flash up a random English word from a library of several hundred: the student tries to guess what it means. When he gives up, he can have the Japanese translation displayed in kanji characters. The device works the other way, too, functioning as a tiny dictionary. Other cards perform currency conversions or display ■the time in whichever country is

fingered on a card-sized map. All these cards cost no more than SNZ3O — SNZ4O apiece. A full deck of them costs no more than the price of a decent Tokyo lunch. Copyright — The Economist