Inspecting gadgets

ACN rounds up the latest and greatest executive gadgets, from Eurocom's server-replacement laptop to the latest in bone technology.

Eurocom D901C Phantom-X

Forget ultra-portables and iPhones - this is a notebook for a real IT professional. Harking back to the days when a portable computer was a regular tower with a carry handle on it, the Eurocom Phantom-X is a server-replacement laptop, complete with a 64-bit Xeon processor, up to 8Gbytes of DDR2 RAM, a total 1.5Tbytes of Raid-enabled storage across three hard drives, and a Blu-ray rewriter. Gosh.

This beast of a machine (it weighs in at 5.4kg) is designed to be deployed as an emergency or stop-gap server - which, once the improbability of a server in a laptop has receded, actually makes a lot of sense, especially for IT managers flitting between multiple sites.

The idea is the Phantom-X can be plugged straight into a corporate network using its Gigabit Ethernet port to cope with a variety of situations: loss of server, unexpected demand, a full-on six-way game of Crysis - the possibilities are nearly endless.Eurocom also makes much of its "UPS" feature - known to the rest of the world as the battery - which will last an hour, according to the vendor.

It comes complete with Red Hat Linux, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008, but it might still struggle with Vista Ultimate.