It appears that new tablets and smartphones are not the only sort of mobile device that IT companies are working on, as NEC decided to try and revamp a certain product type that never really took off.
On today's market, the mobile electronic market is best represented by smartphones and, more recently, tablet PCs, and this is excluding the myriad of netbooks running around.
At some point during the recent years, makers of laptops were also considering a smaller type of PC, one that would have been called smartbook.
These gadgets never established a market, but NEC seems unwilling to give up on the concept just yet, even though its recently exposed project doesn't actually bear the title of smartbook.
As found by
PC Watch, the outfit has been working on what it names the LifeTouch Note, a mini notebook smaller than even the most compact of low-end mobile computers.
To be more specific, it has a screen diagonal of 7 inches, as well as a QWERTY keyboard of similar size.
It is powered by the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core SoC (system-on-chip), the same platform used in pretty much every recent tablet.
NEC also decided to put in 2 GB or 8 GB of storage, plus a microSD card slot capable of expanding said capacity by quite a bit (2/8GB cards will be bundled, though larger ones should also be supported).
Furthermore, to ensure connectivity, the outfit threw in a rear-facing 2 megapixel webcam, GPS, an accelerometer, 802.11 b/g/n WiF, Bluetooth 2.1, a digital compass and a mini USB port.
All of the above are kept operational by a battery that can last for up to 9 hours on a single charge.
The NEC LifeTouch Note mini notebook should become available next month (March, 2011), in two versions.
One of them will have a piano black casing, will cost $480 and will have 2 GB of built-in storage, plus a 2 GB memory card.
The other one, priced at $539, will also be sold in Red or Chocolate Brown and will have 8GB built-in storage, plus an 8GB card.
Finally, April should see the arrival of the latter version with the added benefit of 3G. It will sell for $659.
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