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Qbe Computer—All you Need?
by By Terry Currier NOCCC , tcurrier@aol.com - March 18, 2000 at 03:26:25:
I saw the Qbe (pronounced “cube”) manufactured by Aqcess Technologies, Inc. at COMDEX last year and was impressed with it. So were others they were selling out of their first quarter manufacturing run, and they won the best of COMDEX award. This Personal Computer Tablet (PCT) has everything you could need. Its not a laptop, or handheld Palmtop, it’s a combination of both. It’s 14"x10"x1.5" and weighs about 8 pounds. It comes with Windows 98, NT, or 2000 operating system. It uses a 400MHz Celeron or Pentium II processor, and in the spring they will offer Pentium III processors up to 600MHz. The display is a 13.3" active TFT with resolution up to 1024x768, and combines with TouchPen overlay and handwriting recognition. The handwriting software used is PenOffice by ParaGraph. A keyboard is displayed or they include a compact keyboard and mouse so you can attach to the Porticle. The Porticle is a mobile docking station that gives additional serial, parallel, SVGA and PS2 ports. If that is not enough input ability for you, you can also use voice commands. It uses Voice Xpress Professional speech recognition software from Lernout and Hauspie (L& H). With it you can generate documents up to 140 words per minute. Hard drives will range from 4.2Gb up to 12Gb. For RAM it comes with 64Mb expandable to 512Mb. Built-in is a modem/Ethernet mini-PCI card, internal microphone and stereo speakers, USB and Firewire ports, 24X CD-ROM, and two PCMCIA slots.Need anything else? Well, they put on a hot swappable device bay which allows for additional peripherals including CD-ROM RW and DVD drives, or wireless and cellular modems. So what else could you use? They also put on a Smart- card (reader/writer) for credit cards, and other magnetic information cards. There is also a camera on the top of the tablet in a Image Capture Module port which supports barcode readers and scanners.
A merchant out in the field will able to read the barcode of a product and scan a credit card for the sale. A policeman or anyone can make reports on the spot and take pictures all with one unit. The batteries last 2-4 hours depending on use. The MSRP for the Qbe is $3495. They will be introducing another Lite version with most of the bells and whistles for $2000.
As an option they have the Qbicle (that’s “cubicle”) the ultimate docking station. It functions as a battery recharging station and includes an 88-key keyboard and mouse. The Qbicle’s warm-swappable device bay and additional ports allow for peripherals like CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, floppy disk, hard disk, Zip or LS-120 drives, and printers and scanners, not to mention anything that connects through a parallel, serial, USB, or IEEE-1394 port. When the Qbe isn’t docked, the Qbicle is a complete CD player and AM/FM stereo (so you can play your favorite music CDs), with stereo speakers on either side of the docking tray, and an external headphone jack. Aqcess Technologies (888) 240-2843 or www.qbenet.com, go see their internet site they did a really good job on it.
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