Dave Andrews
Recent introductions by vendors such as Gateway 2000, DEC, and Hewlett-Packard of ultraportable notebooks have reduced feature discrepancy between notebooks that weigh about 4 pounds and their slightly heavier 7-pound cousins. Small notebooks don't yet deliver features such as built-in CD-ROM or SuperVGA resolution. But notebook vendors expect the feature set gap to decrease even more this year.
Subnotebooks that were released last year usually traded compromises (e.g., small screens, less-powerful processors, and low-capacity hard drives) for ultraportability. But now, says Bruce Stephen, an analyst with International Data (Framingham, MA), ``The early design mistakes have been learned and corrected.''
HP's OmniBook 600C (starts at $2800) features an 81/2-inch backlit VGA color pas
sive-matrix display, a 260-MB hard drive from Maxtor that fits in a PCMCIA Type III slot, and support for Windows enhanced mode.
DEC's HiNote Ultra
(from $2000 to $4999) offers 8 MB of RAM standard, up to a 340-MB hard drive, and a 91/2-inch active- or passive-matrix color screen. Gateway 2000's Liberty PC notebook (starts at $2799), which weighs slightly more than 4 pounds, boasts a 10.4-inch dual-scan passive-matrix display. Look for more small notebooks to ship with 10.4-inch or higher-resolution displays, vendors say.
Shyam Jha, DEC's director of product management and marketing, expects the capacity of slim 12.5-mm, 21/2-inch hard drives to increase from the current 340-MB maximum to 500 MB this summer and up to 700 or 800 MB by the end of the year. Tim Williams, R&D manager of HP's mobile-computing division, expects the capacity of rotating storage, 14/5-inch PCMCIA hard drives to increase from 260 to 500 MB or more this year.
The compromises won't be eliminated, howeve
r. Today's CD-ROM drives, for example, are a little too thick and heavy for engineers to squeeze into a 4.2-pound package.
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Small notebooks are becoming more capable thanks to better components and clever designs. DEC's HiNote Ultra features an optional floppy drive that docks to the underside of the portable. Other small notebooks like the HP OmniBook 600 and Gateway 2000 Liberty PC still use the older external floppy drive design, where the drive hangs off the side of the portable.
Stronger, Smaller Notebooks
