There is little point in entering – or re-entering – the notebook computer market these days unless you have something new to say, as Dell Computer Corp has found to its cost. Hewlett-Packard Co has become more adept than most at ferreting out the McGuffin that will make its products stand out from the crowd and grab the audience’s attention, and in its OmniBook 300 mobile hand-held personal computer, unveiled with Microsoft Corp yesterday, it includes Windows 3.1, Excel and Word in ROM. It also has a built-in pop-up mouse that functions as a regular desktop mouse, measures 11.1 by 6.4 by 1.4, weighs 2.9 pounds, and runs for up to nine hours on four standard AA batteries using the 10Mb Flash storage option, up to five with the 40Mb hard disk – either storage device comes on a PCMCIA 2.0 card, and Microsoft’s DoubleSpace compression is used to double those capacities. The company is not yet using its minuscule Kittyhawk disk, but plans to in future. The processor is a 20MHz Am386, the machine uses Chips & Technologies Inc’s 65510 Flat Panel VGA Controller, and there is a facsimile modem option with Microsoft Mail Remote. The Omnibook is at $1,950, UKP1,500 with the disk, $2,275, UKP1,870 with the Flash memory card, and the company says it expects to make a couple hundred thousand OmniBooks during the next 12 months.
