Hitachi ships Transmeta-based notebook

Hitachi has begun shipping a notebook PC in Japan based on Transmeta's Crusoe chip.

The manufacturer intends to launch the Flora-ie 55mi notebook in the US in the near future, but has no plans to sell the device in Europe.

Hitachi said the device has up to seven hours of battery life, and features a pen-input, one touch buttons to connect to the web and send emails, a mobile phone interface, a wireless Lan and a modem. It houses a 400Mhz Crusoe microprocessor, 128Mb of Rom and 192Mb of Ram.

The launch of Transmeta's low-power Crusoe chip has not all been plain sailing for the US startup, which had its initial public offering in November.

Only weeks after the flotation, the company said it was working with NEC to exchange around 300 laptops which could contain faulty Crusoe processors.

Electronics giant Sony also confirmed that it would replace any of its notebooks which could be affected by the same batch of potentially faulty chips.

The problem came to light at the end of November when Transmeta confirmed that a "limited" batch of processors could cause laptops to fail.

According to information from Sony, a "stream read error" message could appear if users tried to reinstall the operating system using the supplied system recovery CD disks, and the machine could stop functioning as a result.