Panasonic's PC Display Goes Wireless

Panasonic's latest portable PC is truly going mobile. The ProNote Air FG, unveiled on Tuesday, features a wireless touch-screen LCD that can be used up to 165 feet away from the PC body.

The product will be exhibited at TechXNY, formerly PC Expo, which starts in New York on Tuesday, June 26. Matsushita Electric Industrial, the company best known for its Panasonic brand name, will start taking orders for the portable PC on Wednesday.

The ProNote Air FG incorporates support for the IEEE 802.11b wireless networking standard. Its display is equipped with 8MB of SDRAM to hold up to 100 pages of information in its memory in the event that the wireless connection is disrupted. The display panel is also water-resistant, Matsushita says.

The ProNote Air FG's Mobile Data Wireless Display weighs just under 2 pounds and is 8.75 (width) by 6.4 (height) by .5 (depth) inches in size. The transflective-type LCD panel, which features SVGA resolution of 800 by 600, is used because it is easier to view in bright sunlight, Matsushita said. The display's battery lasts for around 5 hours with the backlight switched off and 2.5 hours with it on.

The Toughbook Mini PC body weighs under 2.5 pounds, and measures 7.9 (width) by 2 (height) by 3.6 (depth). Equipped with a 300-MHz Pentium III microprocessor, a 5GB hard disk drive, and 64MB of main memory, the Pronote Air FG's main PC battery lasts for about 4 hours. The unit comes equipped with a PC card slot and can connect to the Internet.

On the Go

Matsushita is targeting the ProNote Air FG at users operating remotely, such as workers at construction sites where it is difficult to take most PCs.

Demand for mobile PCs that can function under rough conditions started in the U.S., says Yoshio Ito, the manager of Matsushita's PC marketing division. The company expects to ship between 15,000 and 20,000 units of the ProNote Air FG to North America, in addition to shipments of 5000 in Japan and 10,000 to Europe by the end of the 2001 fiscal year, he says.

One possible application is with police in the U.S., where Matsushita has 60 percent of the market for notebook PCs used by the country's various state police forces, according to Ito. The wireless display capability of the ProNote Air FG is suitable for police patrol motorcycles, Ito says. Its Toughbook Mini PC unit can be mounted on the motorcycle and a highway patrol officer can take out the wireless touch-panel display when approaching a driver he has pulled over.

"We keep focusing on PCs because they [police officers on the road] need large volumes of data, such as criminal records and vehicle registration numbers, which PDAs [personal digital assistants] cannot hold," Ito says.