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
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