Calexico chips out of Hewlett Packard's new N620C notebook

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 12 Mar 2003 at 10:25

Hewlett Packard's offering in the great Centrino stakes, turns out not to be a fully fledged Centrino machine. While fitting a Pentium M processor into the Evo N610 family, HP has chosen to stay with the Lucent chipset for wireless comms for now.

'The 620 is not a full Centrino machine, we've just used the Pentium M processors,' said Steven Gale, Hewlett Packard UK's Senior Category Manager for the Personal Systems group, 'We don't use the Intel integrated wireless - Calexico. Instead we have our own implementation of a display mounted USB device using a Lucent chipset.'

'We've had this implementation for a while' Gale continued. 'We get superior performance and it is switchable between GPRS, Bluetooth as well as wireless'.

The new N620c machine is available with a range of Pentium M processor speeds from 1.3GHz to 1.5GHz and hard disk sizes between 30 and 60Gb. All machines are fitted with the Intel 855PM ('Odem') chipset. Hewlett-Packard are claiming a fairly modest five hours of battery life for the 1.3GHz model

Prices for the Evo Notebook range start at £1,404 for the N620c, with a Pentium M 1.3Ghz, 14" XGA TFT, 30Gb hard disk ,DVD ,256Mb ,LAN/M. At the top of the range the Pentium M 1.5Ghz, 14" SXGA TFT, 60Gb hard drive, DVD/CDRW, 512Mb LAN/M version will cost £2123.