September 1, 2000

Prime movers
We'll design it for you

As our portable appliance feature next month will detail, the companies hoping to power the Internet appliances of our future are providing a tremendous head start to system vendors via reference designs.

National Semiconductor is leading the charge with everything from the Geode processor to plastic enclosures. The company just expanded the scope of its WebPAD platform with software from Merinta. The latter’s iBrow software supports typical portable applications like email, but also provides full access to unmodified Web content, including streaming audio and video, even on systems with small displays.

—Maury Wright