Motherboards in 2002: Preview from Comdex

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Just like DFI, FIC has also started making ATI video cards. If you'll remember we originally brought you pictures of ATI cards manufactured under the FIC brand back in June from Computex.

Aside from motherboards, FIC has also dedicated a lot of resources to their wireless products. We were honored to meet with Gene Sheu, the President of the Networking and Information Group of FIC; his team helped introduce all the new products to us.

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The first product we looked at was the AquaPad; finally ready after over 2 years of development the AquaPad is a webpad that runs Windows CE on a Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 processor. Unfortunately the Windows CE v3.0 that's running on the AquaPad severely limits its functionality; the platform is in dire need of an upgrade to PocketPC 2002 although there are licensing limitations that will prevent that from happening anytime soon.

We also saw FIC's Tablet PC solution which is currently far from final production.

Compaq iPAQ (left) vs. FIC's pda (right)

Here you can see FIC's Windows CE based PDA next to a Compaq iPAQ. Like the Compaq iPAQ, FIC's solution is based off of a 206MHz StrongARM processor and 32MB of RAM; the only difference is that the FIC PDA is a lot thinner. Again the problem with this PDA is it is using an outdated version of Windows CE and not the much more useful PocketPC 2000/2002.