Cambridge, UK-based Tadpole Technology Plc is putting bells and whistles on its SparcBook notebook computer: it can now offer a colour active matrix display and up to 360Mb of disk. It’s pricy though. With the thin-film transistor screen, 16Mb RAM and 180Mb hard disk it has a $13,000 – UKP8,450 – price tag. Tadpole also has a new version of Solaris running, 1.0.1 Version B, for users to run Unix in a mobile environment, which it says is a significant step in its Nomadic Computing Environment strategy. The company describes Version B as SparcBook OS Lite, a compact end-user version of Solaris including Open Windows V3, Nomadic Computing Environment and an optimised Unix kernel and file system packaged into a still demanding 38Mb. It is supposed to offer the mobile user better windowing, battery monitoring, save and resume functionality, electronic mail, facsimile and SLIP connections than previously available.
