You may not know it yet, but the next computer you buy is going to be a netbook. The numbers say so.
Despite their compromised feature sets and puny screens, netbooks have pulled an all-out coup d’état on the portable PC market. Currently, nine out of the top 10 best-selling laptops on Amazon are netbooks. Over 2008, manufacturers shipped 10 million netbooks. And looking farther ahead, ABI Research forecasts that manufacturers will ship 200 million ultra-mobile devices, including netbooks by 2013 — which is about the same anticipated size as the entire laptop market worldwide.
Who could have guessed that low prices and ultra portability would have struck such a chord with consumers?
People are going gaga over these pared-down devices, and manufacturers are keenly aware of that fact. Most of the big PC makers, including Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu, Siemens and Samsung, have recently introduced their first netbooks to this rapidly expanding market.
It’s somewhat ironic that netbooks are shaping up to be the computers of the future: They’re hardly revolutionary; they’re essentially a smaller, dumbed-down version of standard notebooks.
"You’re going to start seeing netbooks become more mainstream, as [top manufacturers such as] Dell and HP begin to include more features in these devices," said Vijay Rakesh, a ThinkPanmure analyst.
Rakesh said that the relatively low price point of netbooks — they range from $300 to $500 — is their primary driving factor, especially in light of a troubled economy. He added that other key factors attracting consumers are their mobility and weight: Most netbooks weigh no more than three pounds and measure about an inch thick.
Netbooks are only going to get more attractive and successful as they expand their feature sets, Rakesh said. And many companies are already taking aim on delivering a full computing experience to these miniature devices, with new chips, batteries and power-saving methods on the horizon.
At the 2008 Intel Developer Forum, Intel officials announced their focus on empowering the netbook universe. The company is developing Moorestown, a platform due in 2009 that Intel promises will be exponentially more powerful and more power efficient than the current Silverthorne (Intel Atom) platform.
Meanwhile, netbook software also promises to evolve. Phoenix
Technologies, the company responsible for the BIOS (Basic Input/Output
System) that boots many Windows computers, is developing a low-power
mobile computing operating system it calls PC 3.0. Running parallel to
Windows, the instant-on environment will allow netbooks to perform
several internet-centric functions without actually booting into
Windows. Functions
promised in PC 3.0 include multimedia players, browsers, internet
telephony, e-mail and IM.
The most important issue Phoenix’s concept would address is battery
life, explains Woody Hobbs, CEO of Phoenix Technologies. If you want to
deliver mobile performance, you have to ensure a netbook can even
handle it without running out of juice.
"You
can give up and say ‘It’s a trade-off; you can’t have all that power and
solve all those problems,’" Hobbs told Wired.com. "But it’s not true:
Technology is capable of addressing the problems. We just have to
address them smartly."
And if Phoenix’s PC 3.0 environment isn’t enough, Toshiba has the bases covered with batteries, too. Toshiba recently unveiled its Super Charge Ion Batteries (SCiB) in Japan — which take a bit over ten minutes to charge and will last longer than current lithium-ion batteries.
A challenge manufacturers will face is keeping the price point low as
they cram more features into these puny devices, Rakesh said. He noted
that Apple has yet to step into the netbook world — and consumers
should have high expectations from the company that revolutionized the
mobile phone.
Not
much has been said about what Apple has in store. The rumor mill has
been churning about a special event announcing a revision of the
extremely successful MacBook, and many have speculated the next release
will be Apple’s netbook: Perhaps the fabled "Brick" or the MacBook Touch, which would essentially be a larger, more powerful version of
the iPhone.
Whatever direction manufacturers decide to take, it’s clear netbooks
are getting closer to fulfilling the vision of Alan Kay, the former
Xerox PARC researcher who first drew the concept of the mobile,
personal computer back when computers were still eating punch cards. In
his concept, dubbed "Dynabook," Kay assessed that a portable computer
must weigh no more than two pounds, sport a display containing at least
1 million pixels, and be extremely thin in one of its dimensions. And
most importantly, a Dynabook would have to be "an amplifier for human
(especially child) endeavors."
"I’d like to think that [netbooks] are finding a form factor and
weight that fits human beings better," Kay said, "but I’m presuming
that it is because many people use only a small part of what they could
do on their larger machines, and much of what they do use computers for
can be done through a browser or a few simple apps."
Photo: sitzmar/Flickr
![Add to Reddit]()
![Add to Facebook]()
![Add to digg]()
Recent Comments