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ThinkPads Go Wireless

Techstination feature for Wednesday, September 13, 2000

Notebook computers... .ready to roam. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bloomberg Bootcamp. It's a case of PC makers following Apple's lead again. More than a year ago... Apple introduced the iBook with built-in antennas for wireless networks. Now IBM is doing it too... on its most affordable models of ThinkPad I Series notebooks. Who needs it? Product marketing director Leo Suarez...

"In the market place today, the people that are most ready to look at that kind of feature function set are small businesses and places like K through 12 education. Small businesses because there is a lot of small business, like a dot com, that are moving into a new office space or warehouse or whatever and they don't want to have the cost of routing cables and doing the whole networking. So to be able to wirelessly set up a LAN, very quickly, very inexpensively is something that is a lot of interest to them."

The new wireless capable ThinkPads will start at just fifteen hundred dollars. For small offices and classrooms... .the idea of being able to walk in with a notebook and be instantly connected to a network is ideal. The future?

"We see wireless as what we call a disruptive technology. And by disruptive we mean that it's a technology that's going to radically change the way people use and behave around notebook machines.

It adds a lot more mobility to mobile computers. Bootcamp, I'm Fred Fishkin, Bloomberg News.