Tadpole had been producing a line of Unix based machines, costing around $6,000 to $12,000. They were hoping a series of lower cost machines starting at $2,995 would increase their customer base, they launched the Sparcle, a Unix notebook workstation, running the Solaris operating System and UltraSPARC processors.

Supplying machines for the defense and government departments, their machines had been heavy duty desktop or under desk systems. These new machines offered similar specifications, but were in the chassis of large laptops.

Tadpole has traditionally sold a small number of high-priced portable Unix systems to government and defense customers. Normally a workstation is classified as a heavy-duty desktop computer used, for example, by automakers for the mechanical design of products. But Tadpole's portable workstations offer the same type of hardware in a notebook chassis that looks like a large home or office laptop.

Tadpole argued that the lower prices meant companies could now afford to purchase Sparcle portables for a large number of product engineers, software developers or technical sales staffers, whereas those businesses might have introduced desktop workstations or Notebook PCs before.

The company marketed the advantages of technical staff being able to travel frequently or work on projects at home, while also having access to productivity software, such as StarOffice, which was preloaded on the Sparcle. This will let engineers carry out their work and still read e-mail and produce word processing documents using the same machine.

Tadpole also developed a CPU sharing feature that lets a Sparcle whose CPU is not being fully utilized run jobs in the background, downloading them via a wireless network.

The main reason the Sparcle portable was less expensive than previous Tadpole products was because it was designed to be more like a PC. It used off-the-shelf components, such as memory, hard drives and optical drives. These components, manufactured to comply with PC industry standards, are much cheaper than the custom-built parts previous Tadpole portables used, allowing the company to pass on the savings.