PC Briefs

NEW YORK — There are portable PC speakers, surround sound PC speakers and now inflatable speakers. Ellula U.S. will start shipping the Hotair speaker set on May 1. The bright green plastic speakers are literally inflated like a child's toy before being plugged into a PC. The speakers, which will carry a $45 suggested retail price, are 10-inches tall and 5-inches wide when inflated and about 2-inches tall when deflated. They are battery powered and deliver 10 watts of power. Ellula has licensed the NXT loudspeaker technology for use in the Hotair system. The company claims that it can quickly turn out speakers in wide variety of shapes and sizes due to the flexible nature of plastic.

SAN DIEGO — Sony boosted the size of its Vaio notebook LCD screens to 16.1-inches with the introduction of the three-unit GRX line. The top two units in the GRX line, the PCG-GRX570 and PCG-GRX590, sport the larger screen, which offers the same viewable area as a 17-inch CRT monitor. The entry-level PCG-GRX550 has a 15.1-inch display. The GRX550 and GRX570 have Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz processors, an internal DVD/CD-RW drive, 512MB of SDRAM. The GRX550 has a 30GB hard drive, while the GRX570 has a 40GB hard drive. The top end model adds a Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor and comes with a wireless LAN PC card, but otherwise has the same features as the GRX570. All three models shipped in March with estimated street prices of $2,099, $2,499 and $2,999.