They’re Small, Cheap and Gaining on PCs : High tech: Once dismissed by the industry as gimmicks, these pocket-sized ‘electronic organizers’ are rapidly becoming more sophisticated.

When Apple Computer Chairman John Sculley said in his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show here that his company would be moving into the consumer electronics business, he sought to define an entirely new class of products--dubbed Personal Digital Assistants--that represented an untapped opportunity.

But a remarkable variety of devices, ranging from “electronic organizers” to hand-held video games to electronic books, that could be included in this new category are already on display here. Apple has the potential to bring important new advances to this emerging area, but it will not be alone.

All of these products--essentially special-purpose computers--share certain key characteristics. They are inexpensive and simple to use. Manufactured in the Far East, they are sold in traditional consumer electronics outlets.

Perhaps the most venerable of these devices are the Sharp Wizard and the Casio Boss, the pioneers in the “electronic organizer” segment. Once dismissed by the computer industry as gimmicks, these pocket-sized machines with their tiny keyboards are rapidly gaining new features that will soon put them in direct competition with steadily shrinking personal computers.

“We’ve passed the early-adopter phase, and the computer community now takes us seriously,” said Nancy Colon, marketing support manager for the Wizard. The organizer market should reach 1.2 million units this year, she said, with growth running at about 40%.

The first organizers served as little more than electronic appointment books. But now plug-in cards add software for a variety of more sophisticated functions, and they can exchange data with traditional personal computers.

Perhaps more significant, new communications devices will allow the Boss and the Wizard to receive messages--and eventually other types of information such as stock quotes or news headlines--via paging systems.

Eventually, sophisticated organizers and palmtop personal computers such as the new 11-oz. HP 95 will likely feature wireless communications. Such communications capabilities were singled out by Sculley as a key component of Apple’s future “PDA.”

Somewhat less sophisticated than the organizers are the electronic books from companies such as Franklin Electronic Publishers, Seiko and Selectronics. These tiny machines, some priced at less than $20, generally contain a single title, often a dictionary or other reference manual.

“We aim for appliance-like simplicity,” says Morton E. David, chairman and CEO of Franklin, which is selling about 1 million books a year. “I want Johnny Lunch-pail to be able to use any of our products.”

Sony Corp. has come out with another kind of electronic book, a hand-held device with a flip-up screen that reads information stored on a special type of compact disc.

The unit also features primitive graphics, and users can choose among a variety of discs containing different titles.

Sales of the Data Discman, as the product is known, have been disappointing, according to John Briesch, president of Sony’s American marketing arm. But the company is expected to release a more advanced version of the product called the Bookman.

Another increasingly popular special-purpose book is the electronic translator. A New Jersey company called British Boston Marketing has even introduced a hand-held “talking translator”: Type in a word in English and a digitized voice will respond in French or Spanish.

The possible variations on these special-purpose data devices are almost endless.

A tiny company called Oregon Scientific has come out with a $60 product whose sole function is to give weather information on any area of the world.

The biggest category for hand-held information devices, though, is probably video games.

Nintendo sold about 4 million copies of its Game Boy machine in 1991, and though few would think of the Game Boy as a computer, a Nintendo software company called Gametek has developed programs that convert the machine into a personal organizer, or a spell-checker, or even a travel guide.

Sega, with its color Game Gear system, sells an attachment that converts the machine into another kind of information device: a television set.

All of the current generation of products are crude in relation to the potential capabilities of cutting-edge computer technology, and Apple hopes to exploit that gap by coming out with much more sophisticated products.