September 6, 1999 Web posted at: 11:32 a.m. EDT (1532 GMT) by Michael Drexler

From...

TOKYO (IDG) -- Hoping to attract twentysomethings and female users, NEC unveiled a pastel-green all-in-one desktop PC in the heart of Tokyo's hippest district.

The stylish, "simplem," as the machine is called, has no separate PC tower nor desktop box. Instead, the guts of the PC are rigged into the 7.8 centimeter-thick LCD package, giving it a super-slim profile and a footprint about one-fifth the size of a standard desktop.

The 6-kilogram simplem's keyboard, mouse, and newly designed remote control are connected to the PC by infrared, eliminating almost all of the cables normally on a PC. The power cord remains, but NEC plans to eliminate the cord connection to the Internet by employing a cellular PC card in the near future.

Simplem will ship with a Celeron 466MHz CPU from Intel, a 66MHz system bus, 32KB of Level-1 cache, and 128KB of Level 2 cache. It will have 512KB of flash ROM, 64MB of SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory chips) and a 6GB hard drive.

The PC's 15-inch TFT LCD comes in 640-by-480-pixel, 800-by-600-pixel, and 1,024-by-768-pixel versions.

NEC began selling an all-in-one desktop in the U.S. called the Z-1 and a number of PC makers have rolled out box-less PCs recently, including Gateway 2000, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Hitachi and Toshiba. Toshiba's DynaTop 6000 went on sale in July.

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NEC was elusive about how much the simplem would cost. "We have worked to build a PC that anyone can use ... Therefore the price should be one that everyone can pay," said Katsuichi Tomita, assistant senior vice president at NEC. Tomita was speaking at a splashy bash, complete with champagne, in Tokyo's tony Omotesando district.

A spokesman said that while the final price had not been determined, it would not be higher than 270,000 yen (US$2,500), making it relatively expensive for a desktop PC. Gateway's Profile PC, for example, ships for around $500 less.

NEC thinks that the simplem will be a hit with users 20 to 30 years of age and with women, according to Tomita.

NEC will begin shipping the simplem on October 14, targeting initial production at 10,000 units per month.

The company will sell the PC overseas, but a spokesman said the timing of the simplem's international launch is still being decided.

Michael Drexler writes for the IDG News Service in Tokyo.