DOVER, N.J. -Casio will ship next year under its Cassiopeia line a super-slim, subnotebook, which weighs only 2 pounds and has up to nine hours of battery life.
First shown at Comdex, and to be on display at CES, the new Mobile PC FIVA model is about the size of a standard sheet of paper, less than an inch thick, and uses an 8.4-inch SVGA TFT LCD screen.
Casio is stressing the ability to combine a thin, lightweight form factor with long battery life through the use of the FIVA’s Transmeta Crusoe processor, which allows six to nine hours of operation when equipped with a large-capacity, long-life battery.
The unit comes with a 100Base-TX LAN, iEEE1394, a CompactFlash Type II card slot and a v.90 K56 Flex high-speed modem. It will ship during the first half at a suggested retail price under $2,000.
Transmeta’s chip architecture breaks from tradition by using software to handle many of the functions traditionally handled by the processor itself. The company reported that this keeps power consumption down with little loss of performance.
