Slim Armadas pack CD-ROM
Compaq rolls out two Armada notebooks with a slim profile and lower weight but a full-size screen and a CD-ROM drive.
The new Armada 7330T and 7350MT notebooks appear poised to compete with other slimline notebooks from IBM, Hitachi, and Sony.
With a 1.5-inch thick case and weighing 5.6 pounds, the systems offer a design first popularized by IBM's ThinkPad 560 system. The systems come with a large screen and keyboard but weigh two or three pounds less than most laptops.
The weight loss has historically come at a price: notebooks this size typically don't include a built-in CD-ROM drive, which is fairly standard on larger notebooks. But this model and some other recently released models from vendors such as Sony have been able to integrate these drives as they have become more compact.
The new models offer many of the features first seen in Compaq's Armada 7700 laptops and use the same docking station. The 7330T and 7350MT use Pentium MMX processors running at 150 and 166 MHz, respectively
Standard memory on the models is 16 to 32 MB, and the 12.1-inch, 800-by-600 display is supported by a 2MB video memory. The computers use removable 2.1GB hard drives and have a second expansion bay that can accept an 8X CD-ROM drive, a diskette drive, or a second hard drive.
A cellular-ready 33.6-kbps modem is standard, and Compaq is promising a software upgrade to the K56 flex protocol in the future.
Prices on the 7300 models will run from $4,399 to $4,899.