There has never been a clearer indication that the PC manufacturers are looking to follow Apple in the phone market, with Dell, Acer and Toshiba all due to launch devices in time for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month.
The big problem for all of these players is, if rumors are true, they seem tied to the operating system of their choice, Windows, at a time when most handsets are leaving behind the awkward office based interface that has never sat neatly onto a phone ‘ except for in the enterprise market.
Taiwanese PC maker Acer has almost certainly been rushed to market in time to upstage Dell’s heavily rumored launch of a smart phone, at the show, by launching one of its own. And laptop specialist Toshiba will now join the fun and launch its own device, based on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, designed to merge PCs and Handsets.
Taiwanese manufacturer Acer will never rest until it wrests the global market leadership away from Dell and Hewlett-Packard, who both ship more than double the number of PCs it makes, while the Taiwan company boasts a healthy 10.9% of the market.
Now it intends to cover moves by Dell to slip into the smart phone market, and has invited journalists at the show to its planned launch. This is the first public admission that it is planning such a move, while the Dell move has been an open secret for some time, and was once again leaked to the Wall Street Journal this week.
Toshiba is not planning to be left out and despite being best known for making TV sets and laptops, it will show a new phone the TG01 at the show. This will use the 1GHz Snapdragon processor do what a number of handsets have tried to do in the past (and failed) hide Windows Mobile under a new interface. The handset will feature DivX and Flash video and be very thin at 9.9 millimeters thick, with a 4.1-inch touchscreen.
Qualcomm has been saying that Snapdragon devices will emerge about ow, but we ha expected most of them to run Google’s Android.
Most reports have it that the Acer device will use the newer Windows Mobile 6.5, just because the Taiwanese company knows the Windows operating system so well, and the same logic has been applied to Dell. We think both would be wiser to keep away from the declining Windows market share in smart phones ‘ it is losing market share for a reason ‘ and develop their own versions around Android, Linux or Symbian. Linux is thought by some to be a possibility for the Acer device, but Symbian has not been mentioned.
There is also a thought that Acer will launch more than one device, on potentially more than one operating system, but this would mean two different teams, working in parallel. The most likely outcome would be some model differentiations on a single device design.
The Softpedia web site is claiming a lot of detail with the device called the Acer DX900 running Windows 6.1 with a 2.8-inch display at 468 x 640 resolution, a 3.0 megapixel camera, which can provide HD resolution all powered by a Samsung processor, with USB and Wi-Fi connectivity.
The Wall Street Journal has now named the Dell devices as the MePhone (oh we geddit, like iPhone but they’ve replaced the I with me, how original). Dell fanciers say that its Zing tool, which it acquired in 2007, which brings internet radio, including versions of the Sirius Satellite Radio programming, to a portable device. We wonder if the Zing music service is yet licensed for content outside of the US?
Dell dropped out of the PDA market when it turned sour during 2007, and seemed throughout that adventure to lack the logistics control that the major handset vendors have. Dell may be a whiz at ensuring its PCs are made to order, but handset assembly is likely to be a bridge too far.