IT'S A SUNDAY morning and while most of Seoul,South Korea, rests, Jae-Heon Lee, President and CEO of Gmate, gets into his car and drives 30 minutes to Pundang, a large commuter town south of the city where his company is based.

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"We've been working every day for the last two years," Lee said, but the former semiconductor engineer employee isn't weary. The reaction to prototypes of the company's first product, a Linux-based PDA (personal digital assistant) with the offbeat name Yopy, at the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany, in February, has him and the rest of Gmate's 30 employees walking on air.

"It was amazing," Lee said. "We were preparing for 1,500 people to visit our stand, but we estimate more than 6,000 people came." At the stand, visitors were drawn to the Yopy -- a hot little handheld computer running on the Linux operating system which offers a sharp 4-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) panel and access to the Internet -- and which can even double as an MP3 player.

The company is hoping to launch the Yopy in late June or early July and is targeting a price somewhere between $400 and $600. Officially, it's aimed at business professionals in their twenties and thirties, but the Yopy looks like it may become a big hit among computer programmers and systems engineers because of its Linux base. Gmate officials at CeBit discovered that the idea of being able to carry Linux in their pocket appeals to many users.

The buzz from the show was transformed into orders quickly. Lee said just a couple of days after he returned from Germany, an order from Hong Kong was received for 20,000 units -- news that made it easy for him to forget about jet lag. Via a partnership with Samsung Electro-Mechanics, which will manufacture the Yopy, the device will be distributed worldwide.

Should the Yopy sell fast this summer, it will be a very welcome recompense for Gmate and all of its employees who have been toiling daily to get the device out on time. Many of the staff at the company have been working weekends.

The company was formed in August of 1998 by Lee after he left a job as a designer of ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) chips at LG Semicon, one of Korea's largest chipmakers.

Five other engineers joined Gmate very early on, pulled away from other local industry heavyweights such as LG Electronics, Hyundai Electronics,and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST).

"I was thinking about wireless Internet devices when I started Gmate," Lee said. Thinking about these got me to thinking about PDAs so we started on ASIC designs for PDAs."

Those designs eventually morphed into plans for the Yopy, the device that now keeps a team of engineers hunched over their workbenches to get the device out the door on time. Lee doesn't let on whether he worries at all about missing the announced launch period and instead says confidently, "We have to, we will."

Gmate Co. Inc., in Pundang, South Korea, is at www.gmate.co.kr. Samsung Electro-Mechanics, in Suwon, is at www.sem.samsung.com.