San Diego-based Research, Development & Innovations Inc, trading as RDI Computer, the creator of the Sparc laptop Brite Lite and now calling itself the second largest supplier of installed Sparcsystems in the world, has its European ducks in row after piggybacking on Sun Microsystems Inc’s distributors in France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Italy. Respectively they include Tekelec SA, BIM BV, Koenig & Hartmann NV, Industriade GmbH and Delphi SA. The company is using Magirus GmbH in Germany. It says European commitments range from a low of 500 to a high of 2,500 boxes over the next six months. These deals are exclusive, leaving RDI to sort out what to do with its manufacturing partner TriGem Ltd, whose UK and European operations are sales and marketing operations. It is considering putting an assembly plant in Ireland so it can fairly say European-made. In North America, the company has 11 distributors, said to include Access Graphics Inc, the firm handling of all of Sun’s smaller technical resellers, committed to an average of 2,500 units each. RDI expects to have three new products to show off at Comdex in the autumn. One will be a briefcase unit, currently called the Brite Lite Lite, weighing under 10 lbs and including all the features of the current Brite Lite except the Sbus slots. It will also have both active matrix colour units, offering 256 colours in 640 by 480 resolution, sourced from Sharp Corp, Kyocera Corp and Hitachi Ltd – although colour screens using the active matrix technology is in very short supply. The last is a Sparc-based mystery box supposedly code-named Ferrari that the company declined to describe, beyond calling it its flagship, intended as a pricy low-volume niche unit that is a laptop and yet isn’t. The company has also arranged with SAIC Inc for it to do Tempested radiation shielded and ruggedised version of Brite Lite to give it a change in the government and defence markets. One of the two UK outlets for the Brite Lite, Frontline Distribution Ltd, Basingstoke, Hampshire, says it has sold 20 of the things, which it lists at UKP8,900, to resellers. RDI and Frontline last week claimed that confusion over distribution of the Brite Lite in the UK – PCS Ltd, Wakefield, Yorkshire, also sells the laptop – has been settled. But the price remains the same: PCS is offering Brite Lite, in the same configuration as Frontline, for UKP7,000.
