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SCMP Reporter

Dell Computer has revealed its new line of multimedia notebook computers based on Intel's low-voltage Pentium 133 megahertz chip.

The CD-Rom drive-equipped Latitude LM notebook with 12.1-inch screen will sell for about $30,000 depending upon final configurations.

Robert Chu, Dell's Asia-Pacific product marketing manager, said the new machine was being priced competitively against similar machines from Texas Instruments (Extensa) and Toshiba (Tecra/Satellite Pro).

Dell has put in a quad-speed CD-Rom drive into a slot that can accept a second battery pack or a floppy disk drive.

  The floppy drive can also be plugged into a parallel port so that files can be loaded simultaneously from either a CD-Rom or floppy drive device.

 Mr Chu pointed to a reclassification of the notebook computer market in the past two years.

He said in 1994 the notebook computer market was dominated by the premium and value notebooks that were mainly 486 and 386-class notebook computers.

 Last year saw the introduction of multimedia machines at a price premium on top of the mainstream machines and the fully featured value-priced machines. He said the sub-notebook market evolved into a segment known as ultra-portable and the feature set of these machines, which generally included 486 machines.

 This year Dell perceives that the market has been redefined into four slightly different markets - the larger systems that have plenty of power and rarely leave the desktop; the fully featured connected notebook, which uses Ethernet connections; the fully featured remote notebook, which is used by the mobile user on the road or at home; and the light market, which includes such machines as the elegant Digital HiNote.

Mr Chu said Dell's Latitude LM fell into the fully featured remote category. Its specifications reveal some interesting planning with future expansion.

  It boasts a 12.5 millimetre low-profile hard disk drive module built by Western Digital, which can be expanded to 1.4 gigabytes when that capacity of drive is released.



Dell Computer includes CD-Rom drive in Pentium notebook series