Toshiba Powers Ahead In The Portable World
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 6, 1989
WITH portable and laptop computers now being cranked out furiously by name manufacturers such as IBM, Apple, Compaq, NEC and Hitachi, it was inevitable that Toshiba would release its best-selling Japanese DynaBook compact laptop in Australia and the US.
Toshiba, which has the most extensive range of portables of any manufacturer, last week also launched one of the first batterypowered portables to use the powerful Intel 30386SX microprocessor, the T3100SX.
The Japanese computer and electronics company is convinced, and the evidence seems to support it, that portables, laptops, and notebook-sized computers are well on their way to securing an equal share, possibly even domination of the personal computer market.
Toshiba, which claims 37 per cent - the largest share - of the Australian portable market, recently sold its one millionth portable personal computer since it began concentrating on portables in 1985, and says its research shows laptops have already taken over as the fastestselling type of microcomputer.
At the launch in Tokyo of the T1000SE (the export version of the DynaBook computer) and the T3100SX, Toshiba's general manager of international operations, information and communications systems, Kazuo Ishiguri, said that while the worldwide market for personal computers was growing annually at a rate of 13 per cent, the corporation forecast a 45 per cent growth rate for portables by 1991.
"We think there will be a second shake-out of the computer industry,"Ishiguro said. "All the suppliers are beginning to recognise the importance of laptop computers, that's why all the big names are rushing into the market."
These suppliers, he gloated discreetly and politely, as only Japanese businessmen can, included Toshiba's two strongest competitors, Compaq and IBM, which initially "did not recognise the importance of laptop computers".
Toshiba likes to portray itself as the foresighted crusader of the laptop. This is probably justified, but industry observers also recall that Toshiba's past attempts to sell desktop computers outside Japan have not been hugely successful, so it made a wise choice and stuck largely with its portable line
One of the major drawbacks of portables is that they are generally more expensive than desktop machines. The T1000SE, which in essence is an 80C86-powered computer with a single 3.5-inch floppy drive, will cost $2,499. For that amount, anyone who does not need portability could buy a much more powerful 80286-based AT desktop system. And the T3100SX will sell for $8,499 -a price which would interest only footloose business executives or professionals.
Ishiguro believed that such price differentials would eventually disappear. "As the laptop marketplace will become larger, then prices will become much more competitive," he said.
While the market for computers for home use - as opposed to business use -proved a few years ago to be a mirage, Ishiguro nevertheless believed that this sector would grow "dramatically" if fed computers designed to process and store personal information. These would be the pocket-sized PCs and personal organiser machines that are already beginning to proliferate.
Toshiba calls its new T1000SE a notebook computer, but while it is the smallest and lightest in the company's 15-laptop range, it is rather more a very compact laptop, weighing 2.8 kilos, 310mm wide by 254mm deep by 44mm high, and supporting a full-size 82-key keyboard.
Predictably, it makes its closest relative in the Toshiba range, the T1000, and a number of competitors' laptops, look fat, old and clumsy. The most visible improvement, apart from the slimness, is its superb, 12cm by 19cm, backlit liquid display screen, with its 640 by 400 dots high resolution.
The T1000SE runs at 10 megahertz, comes with one megabyte of random access memory, and incorporates a standard 1.44Mb 3.5-inch floppy drive which Toshiba says is more than two-thirds thinner than conventional drives, but still makes the SE compatible with IBM-clone systems. Its Ram is expandable to two or three megabytes using either one-megabyte or two-megabyte credit-card sized memory cards.
A system disc is not needed because MS-Dos 3.3 is resident in the SE's Read Only Memory, for automatic booting of the system when power is turned on. There is also an "autoresume" function which enables the user to return to the same place in the application after power is turned off, as when the battery is replaced, without having to reboot.
The system battery lasts 2 1/2 hours, nowhere near, say, the portable Macintosh's claimed 11 hours (there are some doubts about this figure in real, every day use) but reasonable for such a tiny machine, and it can be recharged in four hours (the machine also runs on AC). A power management also shuts down the screen if this is inactive for varying periods.
The T1000SE's expansion features include a slot for a 2,400-bps modem and one 100-pin expansion bus connector. It has parallel and serial ports.
With its much more powerful 30386SX 16-megahertz engine, big brother T3100SX can run 386 software, such as Windows 386, and MS OS/2. It has 1Mb of Ram, expandable to 7Mb, and features a 40Mb hard disc drive with a speedy access time of 25 milliseconds, and a 1.44Mb 3.5-inch floppy drive.
Powered by two removable batteries which can live as long as three hours before being recharged, it is also the first battery-powered portable to combine VGA screen resolution on its trademark gaudy orange and black gas plasma display. At the office, the SX can be plugged into the mains.
Portables are still in their infancy, and their development will continue to astound. Super-high-resolution flat-colour screens that are an unimaginable improvement on present ones have already been developed jointly by IBM and Toshiba, and will be introduced commercially in the next two years. The technology is already here to create a laptop modem that can communicate with a satellite, which would make a portable truly portable. Its introduction is simply a matter of economics.
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald
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