BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies Inc. on Thursday said it had developed a utility technology that will let users check their Outlook data on a notebook computer without needing to boot the machine. The Phoenix FirstWare Assistant will be marketed to notebook vendors and computer logicboard manufacturers as a way for them to differentiate their products as well as give users PDA-like response times for personal data, Phoenix executives said.
The utility is an expanded version of Phoenix"s FirstWare application, itself a part of the Milpitas, Calif., company"s next-generation BIOS software, called the Phoenix Core Managed Environment (cME). The FirstWare application is Phoenix"s latest effort to develop a pre-boot environment where users can access data without having to go through the whole boot process. Originally, cME was designed to give OEMs a BIOS framework for "trusted computing," where data is checked against both a trusted OS as well as a hardware security chip to ensure that it is viewed only by authorized persons.