NEC (UK) Ltd, the sales and marketing division of NEC Europe Ltd, has launched a range of Pentium notebooks, the Versa P series. NEC believes its notebooks are strongly positioned to outsell rival offerings from Toshiba Corp, Compaq Computer Corp and IBM Corp because they are almost entirely manufactured by the company and therefore do not face the supply problems experienced by its competitors. The Versa P/75S, has a Thin Film Transistor liquid crystal display sscreens which has a higher screen resolution that its existing notebooks at 800 by 600 pixels. The P/75C has a lower resolution screen at 640 by 480 pixels. Both notebooks come with 8Mb of RAM that can be expanded to 40Mb using the internal 32-bit slot. They also comes with a removable 810Mb hard disk drive manufactured by IBM. The removable 3.5 1.44MB floppy drive has now been redesigned and renamed the VersaBay. It can be replaced with the VersaBay pack, a dual PCMCIA type II adaptor that can be connected to its MediaDock for multi-media presentation. The MediaDock unit has a built in amplifier, four speakers, and an in-built dual speed CD-ROM is shipping for ú425. NEC estimates Nickel Metal Hydride batteries will give five hours of use and this can be doubled by adding a second battery into the VersaBay. The P/75S is shipping for ú5,500 and the P/75C for ú5,200.
