Ultralite, A Weapon For Laptop Infantrymen
The Age
Thursday March 18, 1993
THERE is an essential militariness about the NEC UltraLite Versa laptop, something that satisfies an atavistic fascination in certain males _ even those who don't want to shoot anything _ for a precision weapon.
Even in the darkness _ tapoketa poketa _ we laptop infantrymen can strip the Versa and reassemble it in less than a minute. The hard disk slides home with a satisfying click, the floppy disk comes out ... so!
... and into the vacant slot you slip another battery, the way you might slide a magazine into the breach or ease a round into the firing chamber.
You can remove the screen, turn it around and replace it with a tablet for a pen operating system or (if your budget restricted you initially to a monochrome screen) with a color screen the minute Tattslotto calls you up with some good news.
The Versa is, in its way, a weapon, at least for NEC, which hopes to use it to shoot its way back into the laptop market. Once a major player in the industry, NEC has faded considerably in recent years, but with this computer it is going to trouble the market leaders. In terms of price and features, laptop users are going to find it difficult to look beyond the Versa.
This is a machine that has clearly been designed after thorough research into those annoying little problems that you become aware of only after you have joined the ranks of the ``road warriors", which is what one study has dubbed the most demanding of mobile professionals.
Many of the Versa's features aren't even original but nobody has bundled them all together in such a powerful little package.
The first thing you notice is the screen. On the color version I have been playing with, it is bright, clear and large, only a little smaller than that of the IBM Think Pad.
The addition of an LCD panel on the computer to alert you to such matters as the level of the battery charge, the level of power management being used, etc, is so much more sensible than having to access a pop-up utility, particulary given that in some cases the pop- up doesn't pop up because of software clashes.
The ability to remove the floppy disk drive and slip in a second battery is quite an advantage, particularly when you are on a long airline trip or when you want to recharge both batteries at once, which I often want to do. Battery life is good and the fact that it uses nickel metal hydride rather than Ni-Cad, means you don't have to wait for it to be fully discharged before recharging it.
I can think of some disadvantages: leaving your floppy disk drive at home _ which you might be tempted to do on occasions _ could get you into trouble on those rare occasions when you absolutely have to boot from a floppy diskette, but, on balance, I would rather have the flexibility offered by NEC.
I would feel a great deal less insecure about technology if I could only update the EGA screen and 40megabyte hard disk on my Toshiba T5100, but that sort of thing simply isn't economical.
Martin Peregin, point-of-sales system manager for the insurance company Colonial Mutual Life, which has just spent around $4million on 600 Ultras, recalls his shock three years ago when he discovered that upgrading the company's laptops from 20MB hard drives to 40MB would have cost $800 for each machine, because of complications like BIOS chip incompatibilities.
That was a major factor in the company's decision to buy what is essentially a pop-out machine. The user can upgrade the hard drive, processor, memory and screen and, by using the Versa's two Type II or one Type III PCMCIA slots, install internal modems, solid state storage etc.
Although it may seem absurd, I suggest that it won't be very long before a 250MB hard disk is going to be an absolute minimum for a powerful laptop.
I had a look at Univel's new UnixWare Personal Edition last weekend running on a Compaq 486 laptop. With its ability, by the end of next month, to run Windows 3.1 programs, and Novell networking built in, it was breathtaking. With a choice of either the Open Look or Motif graphic user interface, you get all the power of UNIX, without the complexity.
It will cost you 50MB of hard-disk space, but UNIX users _ and even some of those Toads of Toad Hall who lust for speed and power _ will think very seriously about putting it on their laptops.
The fact that for only $US249 you can buy a 32-bit operating system with a very approachable graphical user interface is compelling.
NEC's pricing is equally appealing. There are some points I don't like about the Versa. The battery charger is far too bulky, more than twice the size of most of its competitors, and I don't like the keyboard layout at all.
Two of the keys I use most are the insert and delete keys. In my opinion, it's far better to have dedicated keys for those functions, rather than having to hold down the function key to activate an overlay.
On the other hand, a great deal of versatility has been built into the keyboard. There are several additional features that you can access from the function keys, including switching off backlighting and, apparently, the suspend features. In the model I was given to review, that key didn't work. I was testing a late pre-production unit which that had been heavily tested by CML and in those circumstances things sometimes go wrong, but it would be a good idea to test all those function key features before you decided to buy. A good soldier always checks his weapon.
SHAREWARE: Waiting for your computer to ``boot", or start up, can be a time-consuming process, particularly if, as sometimes happens, you have to do it more than once in a single session. That has led to growing popularity for bootup programs. The latest, a freeware program from Houston called Bootall, gives you four options to coldboot (which runs through the POST, or power-on self-test check of hardware and memory) or warmboot, which works more like a keyboard CTRL-ALT-DEL or ``three-finger salute". Bootall has several advantages over other computer reboot-type programs, because it combines both cold and warm boot options into one program, with a menu option that can be aborted, and takes up less room. It also uses the keyboard controller chip to reboot the computer if it determines you do not have a PC or PC/XT.
It also uses a new trick to avoid locking up computers where there are conflicts with memory managers like QEMM or 386MAX. `The Age' has uploaded it to the Melb PC User Group BBS.
The NEC Ultralite Versa laptop comes in four models: 20 megahertz, mono, 80 megabyte version (recommended retail price: $3966 ex tax); 25 megahertz, mono, 120 megabytes (rrp. $4299 ex tax); 25 megahertz, color, 120 megabytes (rrp. $6575 ex tax); 25 megahertz, color, 180 megabytes ($6975 ex tax).
© 1993 The Age
Share This