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Gallery: Best Buy-designed HP and Toshiba notebooks

by Andy Smith  |  November 12, 2008 12:26pm PST  |  Image 12 of 12

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The Toshiba Satellite E105-S140.
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HP had a similar device...
914four 13th Nov 2008
...called the Integral PC, a fully contained HP-UX box that was sold by the thousands to insurance companies. It had a built in printer and modem, and one customer I know of included a phone in the bag so that the user would connect the phone to the Integral PC and the computer to a phone jack. I believe they used the phone to dial into a central computer centre and once they had authenticated verbally with a human at the other end they would then be able to transfer data (or the guy may have been pulling my leg, I never knew for sure). This was around 1992, and they where pretty old by then (at least 5 or 6 years old) and the customer wanted us to help them find a replacement. Unfortunately there wasn't anything that was a direct replacement and the customer was pretty frustrated. They had over 5000 of them.
On a similar topic, despite NEC being generally referred to as the inventor of the laptop in 1987, HP had a "laptop" MS-DOS machine as far back as late 1983 called the HP Portable 110. I had a Portable Plus which I got around 1988 and it was still in use by my sister's family a couple of years ago.
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Pretty Decent Specs!
kaffeboy 12th Nov 2008
For 1,099 it?s a winner!
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Can you tell me why?
petrusa001 12th Nov 2008
-WHY nobody has ever put a cellphone, a VOICE, into a laptop, or netbook ?!?
Is it because I claim a patent royality rights to this potentially hugely lucrative idea?
Just, "call my laptop" ! ..and thats it. WHY do we need a separate cellphone?
thanks.
Petr Buben
www.geek.nexo.com
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I did-- 23 years ago!
kenmacallister 13th Nov 2008
Because laptops already do voice and video chat for free, and Skype links this to phone networks, the VOIP technology is already there. It makes far more sense to imbue cell phones with the capabilities of a laptop-- ala iPhone/RIM Storm/T-Mobile Android and so on.

Back in the days before laptops (1985), I was involved in a project to design a "briefcase computer"- which, at the time, was a revolutionary idea for the public. The unit contained a computer, keyboard, display, fax, printer and a cell phone, which was all new technology at the time. Our closest competitor was the somewhat portable IBM 5150. We made a very expensive (and heavy) prototype, but it all worked.

The problem then was cost. There weren't many people at the time who really needed all that in one box, and we couldn't get the capital for mass-production. I found out years later that the CIA already had briefcases like this long before we did.
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HP had a similar device...
914four 13th Nov 2008
...called the Integral PC, a fully contained HP-UX box that was sold by the thousands to insurance companies. It had a built in printer and modem, and one customer I know of included a phone in the bag so that the user would connect the phone to the Integral PC and the computer to a phone jack. I believe they used the phone to dial into a central computer centre and once they had authenticated verbally with a human at the other end they would then be able to transfer data (or the guy may have been pulling my leg, I never knew for sure). This was around 1992, and they where pretty old by then (at least 5 or 6 years old) and the customer wanted us to help them find a replacement. Unfortunately there wasn't anything that was a direct replacement and the customer was pretty frustrated. They had over 5000 of them.
On a similar topic, despite NEC being generally referred to as the inventor of the laptop in 1987, HP had a "laptop" MS-DOS machine as far back as late 1983 called the HP Portable 110. I had a Portable Plus which I got around 1988 and it was still in use by my sister's family a couple of years ago.

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