Posted 03/02/10 at 07:06:17 AM by Paul Lilly

Acer has never been shy about sharing its goals with the public. On more than one occasion, company chairman J.T. Wang has expressed lofty expectations for his company, including a desire to become the No. 1 notebook supplier by 2011 and the biggest PC vendor of them all in 2012. Standing in its way of both goals is HP, so what's the fastest way to surpass the competition?

According to some market watchers, scooping up Fujitsu would make the most sense. Acer needs to see more than 40 percent on-year growth in 2010 to start to achieve its goals, and it's fairly unlikely that will happen with some major maneuvering.

Acer shipped some 32 million notebooks in 2009, up 32 percent on-year and enough to claim 18 percent of the market. HP, meanwhile, shipped 37 million units.

Acquiring Fujitsu, says market watchers, would not only give Acer the boost it needs to become No. 1, but it's also the most likely target since Fujitsu has a strong sales presence in both Western Europe and Japan.

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Posted 02/10/10 at 03:21:20 PM by Bart Salisbury

If you got a jones-ing for portable scanning, Fujitsu has got just the thing: the ScanSnap S1300 Mobile Scanner. This compact and lightweight device has a long list of features and, best of all, is designed to be used on-the-go.

The S1300 checks in at 3.1 pounds, and is 11.2 inches across. It offers duplex scanning, up to eight pages per minute at 300dpi for color and 600dpi for grayscale. It can work with documents as small as business cards and as long as 34-inches. The sheet feeder will accommodate up to ten pages, with double-sided pages automatically handled.

The S1300’s software, which is both Mac and PC ready, allows output to searchable PDFs, Word and Excel documents, and content management software, such as Entourage or ACT! You can also dump output straight to email.

While the S1300 comes with a power adapter, it's capable of being truly portable by connecting it to two USB ports: one for data and one for power. But, this USB option slows scanning down by about half.

The S1300 will be available from Fujitsu’s online store and authorized resellers, and will cost $295.

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Posted 01/13/10 at 07:07:27 AM by Paul Lilly

Sun and Fujitsu on Tuesday unveiled an upgraded SPARC Enterprise M3000 server the two companies claims will help customers consolidate multiple entry-level servers into a compatc 2U chassis, resulting in space and energy savings.

"Launched just overa year ago, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 server with the Solaris Operating System has been a tremendous success with our customers," said John Fowlwer, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "With this latest release, Sun continues to deliver improved performance and value for customers. From the single processor M3000 to the high-end 64-processor M9000, SPARC and Solaris is the strategic business choice."

The upgraded server packs a new 2.75GHz SPARC64 VII processor and, according to Sun, includes many of the same mission-critical features as the mid- and hi-end SPARC64-based machines. Equipped with the new processor and faster system memory, Sun says performance is improved to tune of 23 percent than the previous generation.

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Posted 01/08/10 at 07:12:09 AM by Paul Lilly

Desktop users aren't the only ones who stand to benefit from Intel's 32nm Clarkdale processors. Fujitsu on Thursday announced plans to outfit at least two new entry-level, single-socket Primergy servers with Intel's new chips.

"The flexibility and power of [the two servers] make them ideally suited for general all-around use, and they are affordable enough to be very attractive to clients in the small and mid-sized market sector," Richard McCormack, senior vice president of Fujitsu's Server and Solutions Business, said in a statement.

The announcement comes on the same day Intel officially lifted the curtain on Clarkdale, which took an investment of $7 billion in four fabs to make possible.

Fujitsu's Primergy TX150 S7 tower system and RX100 S6 rack server are the two models that will use the new chips, and both are aimed at small and medium businesses. According to McCormack, they can also be used in non-mission-critical scenarios, such as Web server farms.

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Posted 12/18/09 at 11:45:02 AM by Paul Lilly

Two Fujitsu-branded tablets found their way to the FTC, including the LifeBook T5010, which is already on sale. But it's the T900/TH900 that has techies turning their heads.

According to the filing, Fujitsu's T900 tablet will feature Intel's new Core 2 Duo i7-670 Arrandale processor clocked at 2.66GHz on a 1066MHz frontside bus with 4MB of cache and an integrated graphics processor. It will be housed in Intel's QM57 chipset.

Other specs look to be the same as the T5010, including a 13.3-inch WXGA display and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. Other than that, details remain sparse, but that's okay - Fujitsu had us at Arrandale.

FCC Filing (PDF)

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Posted 11/30/09 at 07:10:03 AM by Paul Lilly

With the release of its mid-range Eternus(R) DX 400 series and enterprise-class Eternus(R) DX8000 series disk storage systems, Fujitsu says it has completed its global Eternus DX disk storage lineup, which now spans solutions from the entry level on up to the high end.

The Eternus DX4000 series scales up to 428TB, while the DX8000 series offers up to more than 2.7 petabytes, the industry's largest capacity. Performance gets a boost with Fujitsu's 8Gb Fibre Channel host interfaces and quad-core processors.

Both solutions also up the ante with value added features like Data Block Guard, which helps further protect data in RAID arrays. Other features include advanced data copying and mirroring capabilities, native 128-bit AES encryption, and reduced power and cooling requirements with Eco-mode, Fujitsu says.

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Posted 11/24/09 at 11:45:03 AM by Paul Lilly

Not wanting to be left out of in the emerging digital reader scene, both BenQ and Fujitsu will release e-book readers of their own and plan to showcase their devices at the IT Month 2009 consumer trade show in Taiwan, which runs from November 28 to January 1, 2010.

BenQ will have on display a 6-inch e-reader with a touchscreen EPD (electrophoretic display) panel. According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, BenQ will release its digital reader in January 2010, and then follow up that launch with more models in April, including a 9-inch reader.

For Fujitsu's part, the company plans to show off its 8-inch FELPia e-book reader, and there's talk that it might release the device in Taiwan sometime in 2010.

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Posted 11/09/09 at 06:49:06 AM by Paul Lilly

Fujitsu announced it is currently scoping out areas of Western Sydney, Australia hoping to find a location with enough power to build and run a new data center, TheWhir.com reports.

The IT services provider is already constructing new data centers in Perth and Melbourne, both of which address the lack of data center space in Australia. But one thing Fujitsu has found is that existing data centers in the country lack the necessary power to host boatloads of blade-based servers.

In addition to finding a location with the proper power requirements, Fujitsu wants an area with cooler temperatures in order to deploy new free cooling power reduction designs, just as it is currently doing in Perth and Melbourne.

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