{{Short description, Personal Digital Assistant released by Franklin Franklin REX-PRO5

The Franklin REX 5, (also known as the “Rex-Pro”, as the “Rex 5000”, and with cosmetic variation as the “Rex 5001”) was one of the Rex line of

Personal Digital Assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in part ...

s, each a PCMCIA PC card and thus the size of a credit card, built around a

Toshiba , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

emulating a

Zilog Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...

. The REX firmware was written by Starfish Software, and the hardware was manufactured by Citizen Electronics. Earlier models in this line (the Rex and the Rex-3) had almost no input possibilities except to download data when installed in a host computer or in a docking station; the Rex 5 added a sixth button and introduced a modal input method. (The later

REX 6000 The REX 6000 is an ultra-thin Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) produced by Xircom, and later Intel, from about 2000 to 2001. Its primary claim to fame is as "The world's smallest full-function PDA", due to its unusual physical configuration as a ...

again had only five buttons, but included a touch screen.) Further, with 512 KB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, the Rex 5 had twice the memory of the Rex-3 (which, in turn, had four times that of the original Rex). The REX 5000 was repackaged by

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

as the StarTAC ClipOn Organizer, which piggybacked onto digital versions of their popular

StarTAC The Motorola StarTAC, first released on January 3, 1996, is often assumed to be the first ever clamshell (flip) mobile phone. Technically, however, NEC had been releasing flip phones on NTT Docomo's PDC Mova network long before 1996, namely the ...

phone (as well as some Timeport models), expanding the capabilities of the phone from having a capacity of 100 contacts to 1000, and adding calendar and note functionality. The REX 5000 and StarTAC ClipOn Organizer, like earlier models of the Rex, utilized

Starfish Software Starfish Software was founded in 1994 by Philippe Kahn and Sonia Lee, as a spin-off from the Simplify business unit from Borland and Kahn's severance from Borland. It was located in Santa Cruz, California. Starfish developed intellectual proper ...

's TrueSync for data synchronization. Starfish would later be acquired by Motorola. The REX 5000 was succeeded by the Xircom

External links

* http://www.pdastreet.com/hardware/Xircom-REX-5000-2001-5-3-pdastreet-pdas.html
Intel support page for the REX 5000/Pro
Personal digital assistants