Corel NC due October

Corel chief Michael Cowpland said today that the firm's long-waited NC boxes will be available from October. In London this morning, Cowpland, the UK-born CEO and president of the Canadian outfit, said that desktop NCs will be followed six weeks later by notebook NC designs.

The desktops will be based on the ARM-designed StrongARM processor running at 230MHz and delivering the performance of a 200MHz Pentium, Cowpland said. The processor will require no fan, he added. A 1Gb hard drive to cache data will be standard.

The unit will also sport dual Ethernet connections for daisy-chained networks; ISDN and ATM options will likely be available upon release. The book-sized units will be designed by Frog, which has worked with Apple on Macintosh designs, and cost around $700 plus monitor. An MPEG chip will be standard and videoconferencing cameras will be optional. The systems will also be able to output to TVs and Corel is talking to ISPs including AOL about possible licensing deals.

The systems will ship with Visigenic Software's object request broker (ORB) application serving software, and the Linux and QNX Unix operating systems.

Cowpland said the Visigenic software would ensure that users would be able to run legacy, Java and Windows applications. "It's 3D, object-oriented and CORBA-compatible. Unlike [Citrix's] WinFrame, you don't have to give up any functionality," he said.