Micron, Sharp come to 133-MHz party
Micron Electronics and Sharp Electronics today joined the pack of vendors promising notebooks based on Intel's new 133-MHz Mobile Pentium processor.
The Intel processor was unveiled Monday. Texas Instruments, AST Research, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, IBM, Compaq, Digital Equipment, NEC, and Dell all have either announced machines that use the chip or said they intend to announce them.
Micron's version of the 133-MHz notebook is the Millennia TransPort P133, designed as a high-end multimedia computer. The notebook incorporates a high-performance PCI bus, 16MB of Extended Data Out (EDO) RAM, 256K of pipelined burst cache; 16-bit sound; built-in stereo speakers; and a quad-speed CD-ROM drive that can be swapped for either a lithium-ion battery, a floppy disk drive, or a second 1.2GB hard disk drive. With an 810MB hard disk drive, the system is priced at $4,199.
The Millenia sports an 11.3-inch, 800-by-600 resolution LCD (liquid crystal display), but the machine also comes with an NTSC port for connecting to a TV. As for pointing devices, the user can choose a touchpad or a pointing stick.
Sharp, for its part, today rolled out the PC-9070. This PCI-bus-based machine comes with a 12.1-inch, 800-by-600 active-matrix LCD, which features Sharp's Super-High Aperture technology to increase screen brightness without consuming more power. The system also features a removable quad-speed CD-ROM, a GlidePoint pointing device, and a high-speed infrared port that can transfer data at 4MB per second.
Sharp said it will announce pricing when the system ships in mid-April. Both the Micron and Sharp notebooks will come preloaded with Windows 95.