According to Dataquest statistics, Gericom is one of the fastest growing notebook suppliers in Europe, ranking No. 3 in Germany for Q1:02. With the announcement on June 25th 2002 that Gericom will be carrying the "Gericom A2" notebook in Q3 of this year there is a lot of excitement about the possibility of seeing volume shipments of Crusoe-based notebooks for the first time outside of Japan.

The Gericom A2 notebook as far as we can tell is based upon the IIyama NT310S, which is an aluminum encapsulated light weight notebook packing an 800MHz TM5800 Crusoe processor. The A2, pictured below, weighs in at 3.5lbs, measures an anorexic 1" thick, and features a 12.1" 1024x768 XGA display.

With an estimated street price in the $1300USD range, the notebook will ship with a 40GB HDD, combo DVD/CDRW drive and up to 256MB of memory.

One of the biggest potential benefits of this notebook for western users is that it fits into the standard notebook category. Subnotebooks, and ultra-subnotebooks can sometimes be difficult to type on due to the small keyboard size. Battery life will sit in around the 3.7 hour mark.