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"Uncle" Clive Sinclair finally makes the portable bike he was always planning to ...

Twelve years ago, when Sir Clive first told me about his portable bicycle, which ended up being marketed as the Zike, it wasn't quite as daft as it turned out. It didn't have an electric motor. It sold only about two thousand units - at five hundred pounds each, you can see why. But now, he's fixed the problem.

The newest Zike is to be found at the other end of the alphabet; the "A-Bike" and this time, it really is portable.

The inspiration for it was Sinclair's discovery that new fibres with virtually zero stretch meant that the whole drive and control mechanism would snap into place when the thing unfolded, while remaining incredibly light weight.

His plan (he said at the time - 1992) was to have something people carried around on their arm like an umbrella. "You'd be able to take it into the train even if they had a 'no bicycles' policy," he enthused. Originally, the plan was to have a bike in the shape of the letter "X" which folded up like a child's buggy, and it was therefore called the X-Bike, or Xike. That got changed to Zike (trade-mark reasons?) at launch.

But he couldn't resist the lure of electronics; and when the thing surfaced, it weighed a ton - battery, electronic motor and all - and cost a fortune.

The A-Bike is - according to Reuters, the world's smallest and lightest folding bike (or so says Sinclair!) and the picture (courtesy Reuter) shows that Sir Clive himself (admittedly, a keen amateur athlete) has no problems holding it in one hand.

But apparently, the lure of electricity cannot be resisted. This bike costs $300 ( just over £150 sterling ) which is probably more than the average Singapore worker would think of spending on two wheels with pedals.

Meanwhile, if you actually have a genuine Zike, take out insurance. They are rare, collectors' items, but worth astonishingly little right now - with Planet Sinclair estimating a price of around a hundred pounds sterling, or more. Another ten years, and they could be VERY pricey items.

We did ask Sir Clive when he was going to launch in the UK. We rang his London office and got his cheerful urbane voice. It said: "This is Sinclair Research ... " and asked us to leave a message after the tone.

The tone came; followed - just as we were taking breath - by the words: "Memory Full" in a truculent female voice. He must really be in Singapore ...