AMD Inside

Not every road warrior can afford to fork over $3000 or more for a Pentium-powered multimedia notebook. Fortunately, Canon Computer Systems' Innova Book 360CD provides Pentium performance without the Pentium price. It's a full-fledged multimedia notebook with a price of only $2599, but it uses the Pentium-compatible 133-MHz 5x86 processor from AMD.

The Innova Book 360CD doesn't compare favorably with Pentium systems when tested with NSTL's InterMark test of low-level functions. In particular, it was dead last in memory performance. However, these factors don't appear to matter w ith Windows application performance. With our application tests, the Canon portable outshone all other test systems.

What's the price trade-off then, if not performance? For one thing, Canon cut costs on components by using a 10.4-inch dual-scan VGA display instead of an active-matrix screen and a nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery instead of a longer-lasting lithium-ion battery. The battery lasted 2 hours and 18 minutes in our battery run-down tests, while lithium-ion-equipped models averaged 2:48.

The 6.7-pound (with battery) Canon notebook is light for a multimedia notebook, and it has a modular design with a four-speed CD-ROM drive on the right side that you can swap with a floppy drive. The laptop has an IrDA infrared port in the back, and a Type III PC Card slot and an external monitor port on the left side. It has a 32-bit VL-Bus architecture and 1 MB of video memory to boost its graphics performance.

The unit is ready to hit the road right out of the box with applications such as Sidekick for Windows 95 and FaxWorks 3.0. It also has on-line user documents for each of the bundled applications, so you don't have to drag manuals with you on business trips. Canon backs the Innova Book 360CD with a one-year warranty f or parts and labor.

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Product Information

Innova Book 360CD....................$2599

Canon Computer Systems, Inc.
Costa Mesa, CA
Phone:    (800) 848-4123
Internet: 
http://www.ccsi.canon.com

Circle 1064 on Inquiry Card.

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