X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 10)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

Notebooks

Of course, you can’t hope for any global events in this field until the launch of the Dothan, but there are small things, too. For example, it’s always good to hear sounds of the manufacturers’ felling prices down. In April, Intel lowered the prices for three mobile processors. The 1.3GHz Celeron M got the most, stepping down from $134 to $107. Simultaneously, at the Japan IDF, they announced new mobile chips, four of them: 900MHz – 1.3GHz LV and ULV versions of the Celeron M and the Pentium M and the full-fledged 1.4GHz Celeron M priced at… yes, $134!

Another good news from Intel, or rather from the Taiwan-based Toppoly Optoelectronics (Compal’s daughter firm, Intel had invested into), was about a new LCD panel that consumes only about 3W of power against 10W of today’s ordinary screens. This is a great achievement for notebooks where each watt directly affects the battery life time.

That’s the more important as this market is developing by leaps and bounds. For example, Hewlett-Packard sold 3.8 million notebooks in 2002, 6.5 million in 2003 and hopes to sell as many as 11 million pieces in 2004! In other words, the company doubles its sales in this area with every passing year! The competitors don’t sleep, either. IBM will abandon the traditional black color scheme for their notebooks, while Toshiba decided to shut down its Philippines fab for notebook production and move its notebook activities from Japan to China. This will negatively affect its sales this year, but should positively influence the manufacturing cost in the long run, i.e. the profit from each sold device.

Again, this market sleeps until the Dothan, although there were quite a few models rolled out in April. Heavy-weight Centrino-based models enjoy success with the manufacturers: they come with a top-end Pentium M (1.5-1.7GHz), with a 15.4” screen, a CD-RW/DVD drive and other parameters, including a weight of 2.7-2.8kg. Specific models are Prestigio Nobile 153, iRU Stilo 3654, and two devices from Acer - TravelMate 6000 and 8000. I guess we can include the new Apple PowerBook model here, with a 17” screen, an integrated 802.11g controller and a DVD-R recorder.

Apple also introduced a notebook in another mass niche: the iBook sub-notebook with a 12” screen. The Wintel camp responded with a volley of Fujitsu LOOX T50H/70H, Sharp Mebius PC-MC30F and JVC MP-XV841. The Centrino-based models (from Fujitsu and JVC) have a 10” screen, while the Mebius not only has a 12” panel, but also an Athlon XP-M 2000+ processor. On the other hand, the Mebius weighs 2.5kg against 1.5kg of the two models on the ULV Pentium M and Celeron M.

Well, not all people need super-portability and not all people are willing to pay extra money for it. Such users are not forgotten: two cheap models targeted at being a replacement of the desktop PC were launched in April. They are the Dell Latitude 100L and the iRU Intro 4015. The first model features a very sweet price/performance ratio – the minimal configuration with a 14.1” screen, 2.4GHz Celeron and 20GB HDD starts at $899.