Fujitsu PC Corp wants to rise to become a top-five notebook vendor within the next two years and is pumping up its reputation with a $20m advertising campaign starting at the end of this month. The Milipitas, California-based firm is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu Ltd, and was created to launch the company’s line of mobile computers in the US. Fujitsu claims it is the number two notebook vendor in Japan, behind NEC Corp, and said it will mount a two-pronged attack on the North American market to win both corporate and consumer customers and ship product by the end of June. Expect channel strategy announcements next week. Fujitsu expects to partner with a small number of distributors and national retail chains. The company, which is part of the Oracle-led Network Computer consortia, admitted that an Internet terminal, or other emerging hardware technologies, might be part of its US PC division in the future, but it’s currently determined to concentrate only on its notebook line until it reaches its top five goal. Fujitsu’s notebooks come in two flavors for corporates – Monte Carlo and Milan – and the Montego consumer model. All are Intel Pentium-based PCI bus machines, come with Windows 95 or Windows for Workgroups, plus Lotus SmartSuite, Intuit’s Quicken SE and Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc’s 28.8 fax/modem PC cards. The Monte Carlo features a 133MHz, 120MHz or 100MHz Pentium processor, 256Kb L2 cache, 12.1-inch or 11.3-inch SVGA color display, 8Mb or 16Mb RAM, 1Gb or 810Mb hard drive, removable 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, six-speed CD-ROM, MPEG-1 video support, Ergo Trac cursor pointing technology and a second battery option. The Monte Carlo costs from $3,200 to $5,200. The Milan comes with the same processor and RAM options, an 11.3-inch or 10.4-inch SVGA color display 1.2Gb or 810Mb hard drive and costs $2,200 to $4,600. The 4.9lb Montego has a 100MHz Pentium processor, 10.4-inch SVGA color screen, 8MB RAM, 1Gb hard drive, removable internal 3.5-inch floppy disk drive interchangeable with a second battery and costs $3,200.
