Enhanced Notebook Line

Digital adds bigger screen, preloaded NT

By Bob Francis

igital Equipment Corp. is packing some advanced features into its business notebook line with this week's introduction of its HiNote Ultra 2000. The system expands the viewing area from the current leading-edge 13 inches to 14.1 inches, and offers a 3-Gbyte hard drive plus a 20x CD-ROM drive. Those features will show up in other vendors' notebooks later this year, analysts say.

The new features don't come cheap. Pricing for the HiNote Ultra 2000 starts at $5,999 for a system with a 166-MHz Pentium processor with MMX multimedia technology and 32 Mbytes of RAM. To further enhance the notebook's appeal as a desktop replacement system, Digital is offering a multimedia dock a nd enhanced port replicator, as well as preloaded Windows NT with additional management features.

The new machine will be available in volume beginning next month, with worldwide availability in October. While it's being aimed at the same customers that buy IBM's ThinkPad 700 series and Toshiba's Tecra 740, Digital's HiNote Ultra 2000 differs by weighing in at around 5 pounds in a thin, 1.25-inch form factor.

According to Katrina Dahlquist, an analyst with International Data Corp., a research firm in Framingham, Mass., customers are demanding greater portability and more desktop features in notebooks. "The trend is moving to lighter and thinner systems," she says. While sales of portable systems increased only slightly over the first quarter, analysts expect third- and fourth-quarter sales to rise more sharply.

Though Toshiba was somewhat hobbled, second-quarter sales of IBM and Compaq no tebooks grew 12% each in the United States. Both vendors introduced new models during the quarter.

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