Posted on Saturday, December 09 2006 @ 6:34 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NEC
showed off the Shield Pro FC-N21S notebook which is protected against harsh environmental conditions. You can spill a glass of water over it without a problem and it's protected against dust too.
It can also be dropped from waist height onto a hard surface and survive, as NEC also demonstrated at a Tokyo news conference. NEC guarantees the machine will be safe when dropped as long as its a drop of fewer than 90 centimeters, the machine is switched off and the lid folded down.
The computer has a 12.1-inch touch panel LED-backlit screen and is a convertible-type laptop, which means the screen can be flipped around and folded down on the keyboard so that it resembles a tablet PC. At its heart is an Intel Core Solo processor running at 1.2GHz. NEC looked at using a Core Duo processor but the desire to keep the PC fanless meant that it wasn't possible to use a more powerful chip because of the amounts of heat that it would generate.
It will be available in Japan next month for $2,165 to $2,600.
