Tadpole Technology Plc’s Sparc notebook, SparcBook, came in second in the Comdex race to win a Shelly as best portable at the fair, bested only by Apple’s new Macintosh PowerBook – a remarkable showing for both of them considering that Comdex is such an MS-DOS. Tadpole was previewing a colour prototype it expects to start shipping in February. It uses a 9.5 640 by 480 Sanyo screen built using passive matrix technology. It comes in at around 7.5 lbs: the colour configuration runs at about $2,000 more than its the black and white sister. Tadpole chairman and chief executive Robert Gilkes continues to predict that he will sell 10,000 of the SparcBooks in the US alone next year and says he’s already had 1,000 serious enquiries. He sees the SparcBooks being heavily used in distributed management information systems, including those in the finance, defence, field service, insurance and banking markets.
