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From: gooley@sunc1.cs.uiuc.edu (Markian "Party Mineral" Gooley)
Subject: Re: Notebook Manufacturers Listen Up!
Message-ID: <2824B860.476F@ibma0.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@ibma0.cs.uiuc.edu
Date: Mon, 06 May 1991 01:58:56 GMT
References: <1991May04.204037.21028@eng.cam.ac.uk> <1419@yoakum.cs.utexas.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 37

Yes, indeed.  My personal wants are a little bit different, but this
is the right idea.  Here's my (incomplete) list of features:

1) A Real Keyboard.  The new HP machine and the Poquet are heading towards
what I want, but they have these stupid little keyboards that can't be
used for touch-typing.  WHY?  I don't mind an 8.5" by 11" (folded up)
machine if I get a Real Keyboard.  Certainly I don't need something that
must fit in a large coat-pocket.  Am I going to wear a coat everywhere
as a sort of carrying case?

2) Long battery life.  I would gladly lug an extra pound or two in batteries
in order to get a good 10 hours or better.  The Airis machine uses 11 NiCad
C-cells, I understand, and even with a hard disk is rated at over 10 hours.
The Psion and HP and Poquet machines have very long battery life -- how?
I'd be willing to sacrifice clock speed (a bit), backlighting (or have an
on-off switch for it), and maybe even floppy drives for it.  (Why the heck
is "solid state disk" so expensive, by the way?  Some sort of expensive
low-powered static RAMs?)

3) No hard disk.  Please.  All the machines with nice screens have a
#%@$ing hard disk built in.  I  don't  want  one.  It's a NOTEBOOK.  If you
want to provide useful storage, provide two 1.44 M drives, or (if they get
cheap) 2.88s, if you must, designed to use no power when idle.  A single
1.44 would do if that would keep the machine cheap.

4) Low price.  As the earlier posters wrote, who wants to carry around a
$2000 machine?  $500 or so should be about the limit.

5) Low weight.  The Sharp MZ-100 and MZ-200, at current prices, would
seem to be the best existing approximations of what I want (confession:
I've never seen one close up), but they are large and weigh over 8 lbs.
Much too heavy.  4 or 5 lbs. would be okay.

Back to work -- I don't really have time to be writing this...

Mark.
gooley@cs.uiuc.edu