jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com (Jason Asbahr) (05/10/91)
Greets!
Earlier today I was mucking about at the Offshore Technology Conference
in Houston (where else?) and came across a most interesting piece of
hardware (no, not the salesgirl in the jumpsuit!)...
It's smaller than a cube but thicker than a station -- it's Sony's answer
(read as market niche) to the NeXT...the NEWS 3250 laptop.
From their brochure: "...a high performance, full-functioned RISC laptop
workstation that can be taken anywhere. The heart of this 17 lb miracle
is a 20MHz R3000 processor, which together with a R3010 floating-point
accelerator, delivers 17 MIPS and 1.8 MFLOPS. Equipped with up to 24MB of
main memory, and a 240 or 406MB hard disk, the NEWS 3250 can handle any
job expected of a desktop workstation..."
The display is a back-lit LCD 11" monochrome at 1120 x 780 resolution.
A mouse is included (how nice of them - smirk) and X Windows and Motif
are bundled. The drives are 1.44MB and can read MS-DOS and Unix formats.
"In similar mode to the rest of the NEWS workstation line, a high-quality
audio capability is included. 16-bit/8-bit stereo or mono, with sampling
rates up to 37.8kHz, is supported via the built-in speaker and external
input/output audio jacks."
SCSI, Ethernet, serial, and parallel ports available in the back.
The 406MB version goes for $11,000.
Oh yes -- no battery power either.
I must really be out of touch, because seeing the NEWS laptop at the OTC
was a mild shock. If Sony can put out a laptop, so can NeXT! :)
-Jason Asbahr
jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com
jasona@nuchat.sccsi.com
-- chris@nthropy.uucp (Chris Chauvin) (05/10/91)
In article <1991May10.005215.7074@sugar.hackercorp.com> jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com (Jason Asbahr) writes: >It's smaller than a cube but thicker than a station -- it's Sony's answer >(read as market niche) to the NeXT...the NEWS 3250 laptop. > >The display is a back-lit LCD 11" monochrome at 1120 x 780 resolution. >A mouse is included (how nice of them - smirk) and X Windows and Motif >are bundled. The drives are 1.44MB and can read MS-DOS and Unix formats. > >I must really be out of touch, because seeing the NEWS laptop at the OTC >was a mild shock. If Sony can put out a laptop, so can NeXT! :) Did you look at the update rate on the LCD screen? I hear it is rather slow. Supposedly, the cursor gets really big when you move the mouse so that you can follow it. I think maybe this is the reason NeXT hasn't built a laptop. I haven't seen a 3250, so this is all conjecture. > -Jason Asbahr > jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com > jasona@nuchat.sccsi.com >-- Chris Chauvin chris@nth.com
slfields@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Scott L Fields) (05/11/91)
In article <1991May10.155141.24235@nthropy.uucp> chris@nthropy.UUCP (Chris Chauvin) writes: >In article <1991May10.005215.7074@sugar.hackercorp.com> jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com (Jason Asbahr) writes: >>The display is a back-lit LCD 11" monochrome at 1120 x 780 resolution. > > Did you look at the update rate on the LCD screen? I hear it is rather slow. >Supposedly, the cursor gets really big when you move the mouse so that you >can follow it. I think maybe this is the reason NeXT hasn't built a laptop. >I haven't seen a 3250, so this is all conjecture. Do be truthful, I have always been a big fan of Eltroluminescent screen technology. I wish more companies would take notice to them because practically nothing has a better contrast ratio, they are already backlit (as in they don't need it, the screen is like CRT anyway), and they take less power than a full gas plasma (actually, they CAN take less power to run than a gas plasma). This is portrayed in the recent look into cold cathode flat screens. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott Fields slfields@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu University of Oklahoma --------------------------------------------------------------------------------