NEC partners with India's Sify to sell thin PCs
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Japan's NEC  said on Thursday it  will partner with Indian IT services firm Sify Ltd.  to  pitch thin client computing systems in India as an alternative  to conventional desktop computing.
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(InfoWorld) - Engineers at NEC and Hitachi are taking water cooling beyond the processor with a new PC designed to fit into the living room. The Valuestar W went on sale this week in Japan and packs a digital TV tuner along with a drive that can read and write Blu-ray Disc and read HD DVD. It's intended to take the place of a TV so it has to be quiet. Noise from the PC could ruin a good movie, so NEC turned to water cooling to keep the noise low. In most desktop PCs, a large heatsink is bolted to the top of the processor to dissipate heat, and a fan blows the heat outside of the case. A water cooling system pumps water through a heatsink on the chip to more efficiently get rid of heat. It's a more complex and costly arrangement, but a slower and quieter fan can be used. NEC has alreadyÂ used water cooling in several PCsÂ to reduce fan noise so the PC can't easily be heard. With the fan noise all but gone the company has now turned its attention to the next noisiest component: the hard-disk drive. "It's difficult to make a hard-disk drive quieter so we decided to dampen the noise," said Hiroshi Sakai, manager of NEC Personal Products' common engineering department. NEC wrapped the drive in noise-dampening foam, but that means the device gets much hotter, so the processor water cooling system has been extended. In the new PC water flows past both the processor and CPU to keep them. The system was developed with Hitachi, which has built up years of water cooling knowledge through its mainframe systems business. Hitachi showed its first water-cooled PC prototype in 2002 and has worked with vendors including Hewlett-PackardÂ on water-cooled systems. The Valuestar W is the fourth generation of water-cooled PC from NEC and the heatsink has been substantially redesigned since the first PC went on sale in 2003. Back then it was nothing more than a copper pipe snaked over the heatsink plate, but the latest model, developed with Hitachi, pushes water through channels that are less than a tenth of a millimeter wide. Hitachi licenses its water-cooling system to other vendors to help bring the price down. Hitachi itself has a small share of the PC market so it's unable to realize economies of scale through its own products, said Hideaki Gemma, general manager of Hitachi's IT thermal solution group. In addition to NEC the system has been licensed to some Taiwanese PC makers and some television makers, he said. The fourth generation system adds about Â¥10,000 ($86.43) to the cost of the Valuestar W, which is a lot in the competitive PC market place. But NEC hopes consumers will pay the extra money for reduced noise. A version based on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with nVidia GeForce 8400 graphics, the Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD drive, 2GB of memory, a 750GB hard-disk drive, and 22-inch monitor costs about Â¥355,000.
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TOKYO NEC, Japan&#39;s biggest seller of personal computers, said Wednesday that it had developed the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer, with almost double the speed of International Business Machines&#39; fastest machine.
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NEC plans to start selling desktop PCs equipped with HD-DVD drives at the end of 2005, the company announced. Slimmed-down versions of the drives will be added to laptops in 2006.
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After a slight delay, Everex has started shipping its Cloudbook ultraportable PC and will follow up with future models that support touch-screen applications, the company announced Friday.Priced at $399, the Cloudbook is designed to compete with inexpensive ultraportable computers like Asustek&#39;s Eee PC. The Cloudbook runs a version of the Linux OS, includes a 7-inch screen and weighs 0.22 kilograms (0.49 pounds).The company has already shipped 20,000 of the notebooks to retailers including Wal-Mart, Newegg, and TigerDirect, said Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex. Wal-Mart will start selling the product on its Web site on Thursday, he said.ZaReason, which distributes Everex products, said on its Web site Friday that the Cloudbook had sold out. Everex had shipped a few hundred Cloudbooks to ZaReason, Kim said. As of Friday, the PC was not yet available on TigerDirect or Newegg.The Cloudbook was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show last month in Las Vegas. It was originally due to ship in January, but last-minute tweaks to the GNOME interface software caused the delay, Kim said.The computer is powered by a 1.2GHz Via Technologies C7-M processor and runs on the gOS, a flavor of Linux based on Ubuntu. It includes a 30GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM, wired and wireless networking, a DVI (Digital Video Interface) port, a 4-in-1 media card reader, and a lithium-ion battery.The company is also developing a Cloudbook with a touch-screen interface that it plans to make available worldwide by the end of the year, priced at $499, Kim said. It hopes to enlist the open-source community to help it create touch-screen applications for that product. It said it plans to put about 2,000 of the touch-screen Cloudscapes on sale to developers at the end of March for this purpose.Everex may also incorporate solid-state drives in future Cloudbooks as the price of flash storage drops, he said.The Cloudbook will compete with Asustek&#39;s low-cost Eee PC, which has sold around 350,000 units to date since its launch late last year. Acer and MSI are expected to launch low-cost PCs later this year.
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TechWeb - NEC, Hitachi, and Fujitsu are also focused on mainframe migrations to Itanium, but have a far smaller share of the market.
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A California-based computer executive will complete the purchase of Packard Bell from NEC of Japan later this month.
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NEC Solutions America&#39;s new four-processor Express5800/340Hb is designed for data-center applications, server consolidation, and server virtualization.
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(InfoWorld) - Following a similar move by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu Siemens Computers plans to announce a packaged storage area network (SAN) product on Thursday aimed at small and medium-size businesses. The bundle will comprise Fujitsu Siemens' FibreCAT SX RAID storage devices, switches from Brocade Communications Systems,. and host bus adapters from Emulex. It will be priced under â¬8,000 ($10,566), Fujitsu Siemens said. Business-class data protection has traditionally been expensive and difficult to deploy, so many smaller businesses have shied away from SANs. The bundled product, which customers can order under a single part number, aims to cut down on the complexity of choosing components to put together a SAN. It also aims to simplify installation and operation, Fujitsu Siemens said. Businesses that buy the package will be able to expand their SAN as their needs change, according to the company. The demand for greater security and compliance are driving growth in the market for SANs, Fujitsu Siemens said. In October,Â HP introduced SAN productsÂ also aimed at smaller businesses. It includes a blade storage device, a starter kit for simplifying the set-up and operation of SANs, and a virtual tape technology for data backup and recovery. HP's starter kit also included components from Emulex and Brocade. Â
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Dell will sell PCs through stores in Asia and Australia, talking to retail partners now.
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Intel's rugged, low-cost laptop is now available to to consumers and businesses in India.
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Taiwanese company, trying to up its market share, unveils tiny NanoBook, plus hardware for smart phones.Photos: Via's little mobos
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In an effort to push mobility into thin clients, Hewlett-Packard is adding a laptop with minimal storage and wireless networking features to its lineup.The HP Compaq 6720T Mobile Thin Client has 1GB of internal flash storage and will be more of a terminal than a full-blown PC, with data storage and system management handled from a remote server, the company said Thursday. The laptop boots off Windows XP Embedded OS in the flash module.Because data isn&#39;t stored on the laptop, there is less risk of a company losing data, said Thai Nguyen, HP worldwide product marketing manager for thin clients. The thin-client laptop is also managed from a server, diminishing management challenges such as issuing software updates, Nguyen said.Along with better security and easier system management, thin-client architecture uses less power than traditional PCs, said Klaus Besier, vice president for thin clients at HP. The thin-client laptop does not have a fan or moving parts such as a hard drive.The product is targeted at vertical industries such as health care and insurance, Nguyen said.Weighing 5.4 pounds (2.45 kilograms), the laptop is powered by an Intel Celeron M processor. It includes 802.11a/b/g wireless networking, wired networking, integrated graphics, three USB ports and two PC Card slots. It includes a DVD-ROM drive and stereo speakers.The laptop comes with terminal software, including HP Session Allocation Manager, which establishes a secure network connection to remote servers.Priced starting at $725, the 6720t thin client will be available in North America and Japan later this month.Users may not be inclined toward the HP thin-client laptop, said analyst Roger Kay, founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. Terminal users such as financial brokers prefer powerful thin clients that support multiple monitors, and mobile workers want something like Research in Motion&#39;s BlackBerry, he said.The biggest problem with the HP thin client could be its lack of mobility. &quot;You don&#39;t want a situation where you can&#39;t use it unless you are connected,&quot; Kay said. With minimal storage and no network connection, it would be useless on an airplane, for example.HP could be experimenting or demonstrating the laptop as a new concept to the thin-client market and as a predecessor to future HP products, Kay suggested. &quot;It&#39;s an odd product. It won&#39;t be all that successful,&quot; Kay said.However, the thin-client laptop isn&#39;t aimed at &quot;mobile warriors&quot; who spend a lot of time on the road, said Tad Bodeman, director blade PC and thin client solutions at HP. &quot;We&#39;re not trying to replace every laptop PC,&quot; he said.The laptop works better in environments like hospitals, where nurses walk around with laptops on carts wirelessly pulling patient data from a central server, he said, adding that it may also be useful within an office environment. The laptop minimizes the risk of data loss related to theft and gives corporations a device that is low in cost to support and maintain.Bodeman declined to comment about HP&#39;s plans for future thin-client products.HP competes with IBM and ClearCube Technology in the thin-client hardware and software space.
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Wyse Technology is selling a line of thin-client computers with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, making them easier to deploy in public places.
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(InfoWorld) - NEC Corp. executives are negotiating the sale of the company's Packard Bell division, reportedly to eMachines founder Lap Shun "John" Hui. The move would leave NEC without a consumer PC brand, while it continues to supply the European professional market with NEC-branded computers. "NEC is considering an offer, and the process of the sale is underway, but no deal has been completed," NEC spokeswoman Kazuko Andersen said on Friday. However she refused to confirm a story in the International Herald Tribune which identified Hui as the potential buyer. Hui has been publicly shopping for a PC company in recent weeks. In August,Â he made an offer to buy the retail arm of Gateway Inc., but the company'sÂ board rejected the deal. Hui made his initial fortune when he founded the entry-level PC vendor eMachines Inc., and sold it to Gateway in 2004 for US$234 million. Hui owns a reported five percent holding of Gateway stock, as well as Joui International, an office supply company. He has made no public statement about the NEC offer, but has posted media reports about it onÂ his Web site. Calls to the investment banking firm that represents him, Averil Capital Markets Group Inc., were not returned. Whoever the buyer is, this sale will continue NEC's shift from the consumer sector toward enterprise communications. NEC has made several moves in recent months to build its position in telecommunications markets, including a deal in July with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) to develop mobile phone handsets, and with Texas Instruments Inc. to build a hardware platform for future phones. The company alsoÂ agreed in April to buy 60 percent of the Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications division of Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV. NEC described that deal as a step in its plan to achieve a 10 percent share of the global communications market. Packard Bell is the third-largest vendor of consumer PCs in Europe, where its biggest markets are the U.K., France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, the company said. In recent years, Packard Bell has begun to sell MP3 players and DVD players as well as basic PCs, and is now expanding geographically into developing markets in eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Â
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(InfoWorld) - NEC launched its latest laptop PC on Tuesday with a splash. A bottle of water was poured over the computer while it was operating to demonstrate its toughness to harsh environmental conditions. The "Shield Pro" FC-N21S laptop is rated to IP54, an environmental protection rating developed by the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC). IP54 signifies that the machine is protected against ingress of dust at levels that would harm operation and also against splashes of water from all directions. It can also be dropped from waist height onto a hard surface and survive, as NEC also demonstrated at a Tokyo news conference. NEC guarantees the machine will be safe when dropped as long as its a drop of fewer than 90 centimeters, the machine is switched off and the lid folded down. The computer has a 12.1-inch touch panel LED-backlit screen and is a convertible-type laptop, which means the screen can be flipped around and folded down on the keyboard so that it resembles a tablet PC. At its heart is an Intel Core Solo processor running at 1.2GHz. NEC looked at using a Core Duo processor but the desire to keep the PC fanless meant that it wasn't possible to use a more powerful chip because of the amounts of heat that it would generate. Users can choose between a 60GB Serial ATA or 40GB Ultra ATA hard-disk drive. Users also get to choose between Windows XP Professional or Linux as the operating system. The machine will go on sale in Japan in January for between Â¥250,000 and Â¥300,000 ($2,165 and $2,600). NEC is still considering its international sales plans. In March several new models will be launched including a laptop that can stand up to a wider range of temperatures than the standard model. It will be able to operate at between -20 degrees Celsius and 50 degrees Celsius. A model with an 8GB solid state disk made up of flash memory chips will also be available. Â
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Dell Inc , the world's No.2 personal computer maker, said it would sell its latest range through China's largest electronics retailer, GOME Group, aiming to improve on its single-digit mainland market share.