Gateway Plans New Handhelds, Server

More details about Gateway's forthcoming personal digital assistant and a new server to be released in August were revealed by executives Tuesday in a phone interview at CeBIT America in New York.

The Gateway 100X will be Gateway's first handheld when it is released on Monday with the launch of Microsoft's Pocket PC 2003 operating system, said Mike Stinson, vice president and general manager of mobile products for Gateway. The company considers its PDA a high-end product that it will sell for between $300 and $350, he said.

The Poway, California, company will include both a Compact Flash and a secure digital slot in the PDA, Stinson said. It will come with 32MB of RAM and 32MB of ROM, he said. Information about how much RAM would be user accessible was not immediately available.

Gateway will use a 3.5-inch reflective TFT display on the Gateway 100X, with a screen resolution of 320 pixels by 240 pixels, Stinson said. The PDA will also come with a 400MHz XScale processor from Intel, he said.

Other Products Coming

The 100X is only the first in a series of PDAs and smartphones, Stinson said. Gateway will roll out other models over the coming months, at different price points and with different features, he said.

Also among the 50 new products Gateway plans to release this year will be a four-way, rack-mounted server based on Xeon MP processors in late August, said Scott Weinbrandt, general manager for the systems and networking group. The company will also "investigate" the possibility of releasing a server based on Intel's Itanium processor, he said.

Gateway will also add two storage products to its lineup by the end of the year, one in the third quarter and the other toward the end of the year, Weinbrandt said. The company plans to focus on direct-attached storage products, he said.