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Saving space and souping up mobile storage were among the top priorities as hardware vendors offered sneak peeks at their summer wares.
At the Digital Experience mini-trade show here last week, IBM showed off its new compact desktop computer that is due to be announced next week.
Sans a monitor and keyboard, the ThinkCentre S50 Ultra Small is about the size of the Manhattan Yellow Pages, said IBM officials in Somers, N.Y. Like the S50 Small, the S50 Ultra Small opens like a briefcase for easy access to parts. The S50 Ultra Small should be available to the public in July.
Others touting diminutive offerings included PalmOne Inc., which introduced a Bluetooth-compatible GPS (Global Positioning System) device for its Tungsten T3 and Zire 72 handhelds. The device, priced at $299, is small enough to fit inside a pocket or on the dashboard of a car. It comes bundled with GPS software from TomTom Inc., of Concord, Mass., that provides two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps of the United States and Canada. The device will be available June 11, said PalmOne officials in Milpitas, Calif.
And for storing data at home or on the road, SanDisk Corp., of Sunnyvale, Calif., showed a pair of products. The company introduced its first 6-in-1 PC Card Adapter for notebook computer users who want to transfer files from a variety of devices to their PCs.
The adapter supports the SD Card, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick Card, Memory Stick Pro Card, xD-Picture Card and SmartMedia Card formats. To read a card, users slide it into the adapter and slide the adapter into any computer with a PC Card slot.
The 6-in-1 PC Card Adapter is due this summer, priced at $29.99.
The company also introduced the SanDisk 256 Wi-Fi SD Combination card, which includes memory and WLAN (wireless LAN) support in a single SD Card. The new card works with handheld devices that have an SDIO (secure digital I/O)-enabled slot and run on Microsoft Corp.s Pocket PC 2002, Pocket PC 2003 or Windows Mobile 2003 operating systems.
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