Fujitsu Ltd is on the verge of building laptops that offer flash memory instead of the conventional hard disk drive (HDD), according to a report in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The company has announced that it will offer 16G-byte or 32G-byte flash memory disk in its B-series machines that are slated to go on sale in late October.
Consumers will have to shell out $670 for a 16GB disk, while the 32GB disk will cost an extra $1,340. "The price is high, but we judged there is adequate demand from companies for NAND PCs, which greatly reduce the risk of losing data," said Masami Yamamoto, corporate vice president at Fujitsu. "It may be a slow start, but we want to be ready when laptops will be as handy as mobile phones."
The company estimated that it might receive at least 20,000 orders for the NAND-convertible Lifebook laptops till the end of March next year. Yamamoto said that even if 20 percent of the orders were for flash drives, then Fujitsu would be selling 4,000 such machines.
The new drives are manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, which has already housed these drives in its own Q30 laptop Q1-SSD ultra-mobile PC. Fujitsu's move into the market comes close on the heels of Sony introducing a handheld computer fitted with NAND.
