Computer gifts gain popularity, retailers stock up for holidays.

In this age of automation, computer gifts are becoming more popular than ever before. And that phenomenon has Los Angeles area computer retailers stocking up on what they expect to be the hottest-sellers this Christmas season.

The Business Journal interviewed computer manufacturers, retailers and industry experts to get predictions on what this year's top-sellers will be.

Word on the street is that products related to multimedia (the blending of sound and data) and palm-top computers (tiny computers that can do virtually anything except make coffee) are all expected to be big sellers this Christmas.

At L.A. Tronics in West L.A., store manager Steve Jelesijevic said the Psion Series 3 pocket computer is "blowing away" such well-known brands as Sharp Wizard OZ8200 ($297) and Hewlett Packard 95LX ($400). He said an NBC executive recently walked in and bought 10 of the Psion's 256K model, which retails for $400.

Steve Mitchell, a salesman in the store, said he even gets calls from the Midwest from people who are looking to buy the computer but don't have access to it because the Psion Series is not being sold in that region yet.

Unlike the Hewlett Packard model, the Psion is more adaptable to printers, and it has a much larger memory capacity: up to 4.2 megabytes of RAM (random access memory) vs. 1.5 megabytes for the HP and only 256 kilobytes for the Wizard, said Mitchell. He said the Psion is also a lot easier to use as an organizer than the other two, and it can be hooked up to any personal computer or Macintosh.

Along with being an organizer, the Psion has a Microsoft Word-compatible word processor with multiple printer fonts, style sheets and graphics. It also has a spreadsheet compatible with the Lotus 1-2-3, a database, calendar, an alarm clock and even a worldclass chess game.

Industry watchers said even more palmtops will be hitting the market in 1993. Apple Computer Inc., for example, is bringing its what it calls "revolutionary" Newton technology to the world of palmtops by licensing the technology to Sharp Corp. of Japan.

The Newton palmtop is expected to be in the market in the first half of 1993 and will cost "well under $1,000," said an Apple spokeswoman.

The ambitious aim for Newton technology is to replace paper, pen, sticky notes and notepads with a new class of products called "Personal Digital Assistants."

Based on Reduced Instruction Set Computing or RISC, the Newton technology will go a step further than existing palmtop computers by actually interpreting data.

The computer will be able to recognize handwritten notes and convert them to typed form. With a touch of the button, the note can be transformed to a business format, and a fax number can be automatically retrieved based on a person's name.

When shopping for a palmtop, make sure it has a parallel printer, meaning it can be hooked up to any printer, experts said. This feature is important whether you are planning to use the palmtop as a computer or as a less-sophisticated tool, such as an organizer.

However, if you are just looking for an organizer, not a computer, there are a variety of personal organizers that sell as low as $15.

L.A. Tronics' Mitchell said the best-selling organizer, the high-end Sharp 64K, is quite a bit more expensive. Its suggested retail price is $148. That organizer can be hooked up to a PC, and it comes with a calculator, clock, schedule, notes and an anniversary remainder. The next best-selling organizer, Mitchell said, is a Sharp 64K organizer, at $90, which offers the same functions but cannot be hooked up to a printer.

Psion recently announced that it too is coming out with an organizer, a 128K organizer that will sell for about $100 less than its popular 256K palmtop computer.

Accessories are another matter to consider, computer retailers pointed out. The cable needed to link a pocket computer or organizer with a PC or Macintosh typically runs about $100. Memory expansion cards are another $70 to $300, and fax modems can cost up to $300. Traveling printers are just under $400.

Other popular organizers are the handheld phone indexes that combine a paper calendar with a calculator which stores names and numbers. They sell for under $100.

Radio Shack sells a Rolodex Pocket Planner for $19.95 that stores up to 110 names and recalls items by scrolling or searching. It also comes with a calculator, time-zone map and conversions for standard to metric measure.

In the multimedia realm, Radio Shack is expecting a big seller this Christmas to be its Tandy Sensation, a multimedia PC that is packaged with popular software packages and a variety of CD-ROM disks. It sells around $2,300 with a monitor, about $1,000 less than previous multimedia PCs, said a spokesman from Radio Shack.

If you already have a PC, you can purchase CD-ROM drives separately now for as low as $300, less than half of what they cost a year ago.

Some of the more popular CD-ROM packages, according to Radio Shack, include the following:

* Compton's Family Encyclopedia ($395). It allows users to click on an image, such as an automobile engine, and receive information about that image, such as how pistons work. Or they can hear excerpts from Richard Nixon by clicking on a Nixon icon. The encyclopedia has 15,000 images, a world atlas and Webster's Intermediate Dictionary.

* Trax from Passport Design Inc. ($100). It allows users to compose, record, edit and play back musical arrangements.

* Guide from Owl International Inc. ($495). It is a step-by-step guide to producing multimedia presentations for business use.

* Any of the language selections ($70 to $100). They come with games, stories, grammar explanations and voices of native speakers.

Numerous companies are coming out with CD-ROMs now, though not all are sold at Radio Shack. For instance, Microsoft Corp. just introduced a movie guide for the multimedia PC called Cinemania ($80). It offers 19,000 movie reviews dating from 1914 to 1991, biographies of actors, directors and producers, as well as movie stills, dialogue from classic movies and a listing of Academy Awards.

For people who want the CD-ROM technology, but don't want it on a computer, Tandy has developed a product that allows converted CD-ROMs to be played on a television set, similar to the popular Nintendo games.

The product, Video Information Systems (VIS), sells for $700, and it comes with Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia. Consumers wishing to play CD-ROMs on a TV just must buy CD-ROMs designated for the system.

Other items that industry watchers pointed out as "pretty nifty gadgets" include products from Logitech, a company based in Fremont, Calif. Those include a family of hand-held scanners called ScanMan ($300 to $700), a digital camera called FotoMan ($800) that can be hooked up to a computer and a cordless PC mouse called MouseMan ($170).

For the diehard sports fans, a new company in San Mateo called DataSport developed SporTrax, a hand-held unit that offers sports updates on games in progress.

The company has a marketing and licensing agreement with Sporting News, a Times-Mirror publication, said Larry Kramer, president of the company and former editor of the San Francisco Examiner.

The unit retails for $495 and the monthly subscription rate varies from $60, if the user signs up for an annual fee, to $80, if the user signs up on a month-to-month basis.

The sports information, including how a player scored, is beamed down from a satellite to the user's hand-held unit within just a few minutes of play. The company is using the same network as Data Publishing Corp.'s QuoTrek, the hand-held unit that has been offering up-to-date stock prices since 1984. (The new version of QuoTrek, incidentally, includes alerts if you want to know when a stock hits a certain price.)

For the consummate commuter, be on the lookout for a hand-held traffic monitor from Way To Go Corp. in Berkeley.

The company just came out with its Bay Area monitor for $200 and expects to have one for the Los Angeles area in the next year, said a spokesman from the company.

By clicking on a map on the device indicating the route the user is interested in, a digitized voice describes the road conditions and offers predictions of traffic delays.

At the more-affordable level, retailers are expecting to sell a good number of crossword puzzle solvers. Sharper Image sells one the size of the credit card for $40, with a 250,000-word vocabulary. Users enter a partial word and the computer comes up with a selection of words. It also can finish phrases and unscramble letters to find words.

But what do people always rely on for last-minute gifts?

The answer, said retailers, is good old calculators.