Thin Clients: Igel 

• DT Research
• HP
• Igel
• Neoware
• Relisys
• Wyse

Overview

Igel are german company who have been producing thin clients since 1997. These occasionally appear on eBay. My first encounters with Igel products were with the 2100 and 2110LX which I must admit I liked a lot. I found them to be well engineered and reasonable in appearance. They also had the advantage of using Compact Flash cards rather than DOMs along with a normal BIOS.

Literature

The one downside is that their website is very much oriented towards their current models. Whilst they do have a firmware archive for discontinued models there is very little in the way of information, publicity material etc on these old models, although, with patience and luck, you might be able to find an old brochure on one of their distributors' web sites. However they do have a useful list (reproduced below) of End-of-life products giving the dates manufacture and maintenance ceased along with the version number of the last released firmware.

Model labelling

The final bugbear is their labelling. The ones I have seen carry a number like Igel 2/4 which means absolutely nothing to me. I believe this identifies the basic hardware although I haven't seen anything to back up this guess. As far as specifications are concerned all the publicity material refers to the product name such as 2110 LX or Smart. At least the suffix (CE/LX/XP) identifies the operating system! When you find old ones for sale however they are often listed using the 1/3 style number from the label so you may not have a clear idea of exactly what you're spending your money on.

At the moment my best guess is:

Label	Model Range
1/1	2100 (early) Smart series
1/2	2110 (later) Smart series
3/3	3200 (early) Compact series
3/4	3210 (later) Compact series
5/4	4210 Winestra series

Certainly the third digit in the Model Range would appear to change when the internal circuit board is upgraded.

End-of-life list

This list came from here.

In this list you can find the End-of-life dates of all IGEL products as well as the End-of-Maintenance dates of the referring firmware.

After the End-of-Maintenance IGEL customers still have the possibility to purchase firmware releases. For further information or if your device is not listed, please contact us by phone +49 (0)421 - 52094 0 or to identify your specific migration paths.

Any comments? email me. Last update August 2010