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SUBJECT: IBM PALMTOP TAPS PC CARDS FOR VERSATILITY
SOURCE: CMP Publications via Fulfillment by INDIVIDUAL, Inc.
DATE: January 17, 1996
INDEX: [1]
ORDER NO: 357783#
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Las Vegas, Electronic Engineering Times via Individual Inc. : IBM Corp. is
readying a palmtop PC that combines a pager, digital still camera, portable
phone, network client and PDA. The tiny (1.32-pound) 486SX/33-MHz-based
256-color unit drew big crowds at a sneak preview at the Consumer
Electronics Show (CES), which closed last week.
Designed by IBM Japan, the IBM Palm Top PC 110 uses a lithium-ion battery
and can run full PC functions based on the PC/AT architecture.
"We built something that is so portable, so versatile and yet fully
functional as a PC," said Joe Takemura, advisory manager of strategic mobile
computing for worldwide strategic marketing at IBM Personal Computer Co.
(Tokyo).
Simply by changing a PCMCIA card with different functionalities, the unit
becomes one of several consumer products: PDA, FM radio, digital camera or
portable phone.
A PCMCIA card slot houses two Type II cards or one Type III card. With 4
Mbytes of main memory, the unit has a 4-Mbyte storage space made possible
by internal flash memory, and it supports PCMCIA boot.
The Palm Top PC comes with a 4.7-inch double-supertwisted-nematic color
LCD panel supporting 256-color, 640 x 480 VGA. When connected to an
external display, the Palm Top is capable of 800 x 600 Super VGA.
The main body incorporates Chips and Technologies' 65535 graphics chip
with 512 kbytes of video RAM. An integrated speaker offers 8-bit monaural
sound.
Interfaces include a fax/modem, compact flash port, phone head-set jack
and port-replicator bus. A port replicator is a docking station onto which
the Palm Top PC can be placed, to take advantage of a floppy-disk drive and
a PC card with a 260-Mbyte hard-disk drive using Windows 3.1.
What's more, the Palm Top provides an internal telephone receiver and
microphone on the front panel, so that the unit can be employed as a
telephone receiver.
By inserting a tiny, 270,000-pixel charge-coupled-device color camera
mounted onto a PCMCIA Type II card, the Palm Top PC becomes a digital still
camera, storing JPEG-compressed, true-color digital pictures.
Three modes
The camera, made by Canon, has three selectable modes. Standard mode uses
as much as 30 kbytes to store one still picture, with detail mode at 60
kbytes and half-rate at 15 kbytes. Once digital pictures are taken, you can
use the Palm Top's telephony capability to transmit them over a phone
line.
The Palm Top PC has a small keyboard, a pointing head and click buttons,
but it can also be connected to a full-size, external traveling keyboard
and a mouse for serious word processing.
Separately, IBM demonstrated an SRAM PC card, ChipCard TC-100, in PCMCIA
Type II. The card comes with an LCD panel for 72 x 24 graphics display, a
24-button keypad and an 8-bit microcontroller.
In Japan, a basic Palm Top PC without a docking station costs $1,690;
with a docking station, $2,890. A PCMCIA Type II card-based camera,
designed and made by Canon, costs $398.
IBM Japan has been shipping Palm Top PCs in Japan since October. No U.S.
launch is planned.
<<Electronic Engineering Times -- 01-15-96, p. 10>>
--- By Junko Yoshida
[01-17-96 at 19:22 EST, Copyright 1996, CMP Publications, Inc., File:
c0117024.8mp]
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