Hitachi PriusGear 150H2VPW
Hitachi, a smaller player in the Japanese notebook has released their latest notebook. The PriusGear 150H2VPW. What makes this interesting to me is the 12” Widescreen of 1280x800. There aren’t too many pictures of the device but it looks pretty decent.
The specs are pretty decent. Pentium M 1.5Ghz, up to 768MB (but probably 1GB max), 60GB ATA 100 hard disk, a DVD-R/RW burner, 802.11b/g built-in wireless, and a built-in TV tuner option with hardware based MPEG-2 recording options. Additionally, it has two USB2 ports, modem, LAN, firewire, s-video out, vga out, pc card and cf card slots, and only weighs 1.88kg (or 4.14lbs). Battery life is only rated around 2.6 hours. There is a larger battery option but ther’s no mentioned specifics on how long it will last. The screen is a new high contrast screen that should be comparable to the glossy screens that are becoming popular. The keyboard has a very decent 18mm pitch so travel should be extremely comfortable.
I like the size and weight of this system as I feel it’s the perfect combination of power, size and weight if you don’t need really long battery life. For people who want a more mobile desktop then it’s pretty good with its 1.5Ghz Pentium M (roughly equivalent to a 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 processor). I hope to see competitors release slightly larger models in the 12” range with widescreens. The design isn’t too fancy but it has clean lines. The frame is built using magnesium so it should be fairly strong. I may have to look into this item in the future…it’s definitely intriguing.
