Hannover Fairs’ first ever CeBit America show opened its doors last week at the Jacob Javits Convention Center here to somewhat sparse crowds that came to see what was primarily an enterprise-level IT event that featured a smattering of consumer products.
These included a new Hewlett-Packard desktop PC, an Iomega DVD burner that can write to all media formats, and from 3Com, wireless networking devices designed to the just-ratified 802.11g specification.
The show, which ran from June 18-20, had 360 exhibitors and about 10,000 plus attendees.
Iomega has taken the dual-format DVD burner to the next level with the introduction last week of two Super DVD tri-format drive at the CeBit America show, here.
The Super DVD drive can burn to the DVD plus, dash and RAM formats, eliminating any customer confusion. In addition, the drive comes with Iomega software that tells the end user what type of media to use for a specific task, said Rick Giannini, Iomega’s product manager. This is done through a wizard that pops up when the drive is selected. A series of tasks are listed, and when one is chosen, a window opens recommending that either R or RW dash, plus or RAM media be used. The drive can also burn CDs.
The internal version Super Drive will ship in August with a $329 suggested retail. An external USB 2.0 will ship the following month with a $379 suggested retail.
Write speeds are 4x write, 2.4x rewrite and 12x read for plus and dash RW media, 3x for RAM and 24x write, 16 rewrite and 32x read for CD-RW.
In other news, Iomega announced that it recently shipped the 50 millionth Zip drive. The company will expand its USB drive line to include 512MB and 1GB versions later this year.
HP showed the m200 series HP Media Center PCs, its first using the Media Center operating system to be priced below $1,000. The basic model, with a $999 suggested retail, has a 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of DDR memory, DVD+RW drives, hard drives up to 250GB and PVR capability.
In July, HP will follow this initial release with the m260n, which has a more powerful P4 2.6GHz processor with Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology. It carries a $1,299 suggested retail. The m270n steps to a 2.8GHz P4 chip and adds Klipsch Promedia 2.1 200-watt speakers. The final model is the m280n. It has a 3GHz P4 processor, wireless keyboard, 200GB hard drive and a Klipsch 5.1 Promedia surround sound system. Suggested retail is $1,599.
