The Netbook war is hotting up. Intel said on an analyst conference call this week that it will introduce a cheaper, more efficient version of the Atom chip used in many Netbooks and would ship it in the fourth quarter.
We don’t usually bother with the world of PCs, and this is not at first glance Faultline favored territory, but the rise of Netbooks is coinciding with wide scale availability of broadband wireless (EV-DO and HSDPA), and the combination promises to reshape the portable device market and the route to market for PCs. It’s probably the biggest threat that Microsoft (and Intel) have faced in 20 years.
In order to sell broadband wireless subscriptions cellular operators are selling or planning to sell Netbooks and these will replace existing routes to market. We think that will reduce the number of surviving brands.
Intel also said this week that its open source Linux-based operating system for Netbooks called Moblin, is now in beta testing (see elsewhere in this issue).
Intel’s next gen Atom is code-named “Pine Trail” and will have two parts instead of three, better battery life and higher performance
The shift from desktop to laptop has been slow, probably taking 15 years, but today more than half of all PCs sold are laptops, and the percentage is going up not down. So portability has become a huge issue and there are multiple form factors chasing it, the smart phone, the MID, the Ultra Mobile PC and the Netbook.
On the near horizon are a number of concepts that will blur the boundaries further, PCs will emerge which have a processing unit with mini keyboards, which are portable, but which speak wirelessly to other system components, such full sized keyboards, printers, and disk storage, which stay put and do not travel. That was one of the promises of Ultra Wide Band, but for now the energy of the industry is focused on triggering new buying trends during the recession, and also on offering a device which fits perfectly with broadband wireless ‘ broadband from a cellular connection.
At the heart of that quest is a metric that is coming to be well known in PC design circles, ‘MIPS per watt,’ translated to how many millions of instructions per second can your processor give you for each Watt of power your device consumes. This is a simple quest and not many PC makers have really understood it quite yet. People want to go out to work each day with their device, connect to the internet throughout an 8 hour day while the device remains on, and still have enough charge to email home and play music, when their shift is done. It’s a tough mission.
The PC industry has been steadily focused on ‘Bang Per Buck’ for so long, translated to ‘What new feature can I give the consumer so that he buys my PC for the obligatory $1,000 I want for my machines.’
The rise of broadband wireless and new economic conditions have combined to accelerate Mips per Watt thinking, but it still has some way to go, and it has had some unforeseen circumstances. There are a number of assumptions behind the Netbook emergence ‘ such as the fact that everyone has a PC already at home and another at work, so they just need something to keep them going in between, that and an increasing requirement to be on the internet 24 – 7 which explains the endurance of the Blackberry, which only offered email, not internet and yet it still made it hugely popular.
This week Dell came out with a new range of Inspiron Mini 10v laptops, using the Atom, using Windows in the US and hard drives and Ubunto Linux outside the US. Ubunto devices have no hard drive, which makes them lighter and more Netbook like, but they don’t come with a broadband wireless chip.
So don’t be fooled, these are not true Netbooks. Many of today’s Netbooks don’t do enough, run slowly and still cost too much for what you get. Which is why Intel is desperately pushing more performance out of the Atom processor range, and trying to kill anything that uses battery.
However a combination of using ARM based processors, the low powered chip design which drives most handsets (inside the Qualcomm Snapdragon for example), with operating systems like Android (or Moblin), will take this price level and stretch the capabilities and almost certainly add broadband on the motherboard. Intel is just hoping that it can drive down its Mips per Watt quickly enough to keep pace.
AT&T says its trial selling Netbooks in company stores in a couple of cities has been successful so it will begin selling small laptops nationwide in a few months, but of course it would prefer that they were genuine Netbooks.
The carrier has already said it will expand its Notebook lineup. Notebooks from Acer, Dell and Lenovo which have built-in AT&T 3G cards will be sold in AT&T’s 2,200 stores across the U.S. starting as early as June. People will also be able to buy the computers on AT&T’s Web site.
Like cell phones, the Netbooks from AT&T come with a discount when a customer signs a contract for wireless service says for $99 with a contract that costs $40 or $60 a month for two years.
Verizon though has perhaps gone the whole hog and pushed for a true Netbook. It has just begun selling a subsidized HP Mini 1115NR with a $40 a month 2 year contract. It runs the typical 1.6GHz Intel Atom has 1 GB memory, with a tiny 16GB of flash storage has an 8.9 inch screen and comes with Windows XP and a webcam.