Alec Saunders SquawkBox

What a difference a couple of years makes.  Before iPhone came along, the world of touch screen devices was moribund – confined to tablet PC’s with pens and not much else.  Today, fingertip driven UI’s are the rage, and the enthusiasm for touch devices generated by the launch of iPhone continues unabated. Consider the following stories currently headlining techmeme:

• Apple Reveals New Touch Screen Technology for iPhone & MacBook Tablet
• Plastic Logic (Finally) Shows Off The Que, Its (Very Expensive) Kindle Competitor
• HP’s Windows 7 Slate Device Revealed by Steve Ballmer
• The Other HP Slate Runs On Android
• Dell confirms Android-powered tablet device

All of that without a mention of Apple’s mysterious tablet device, which has been rumoured for months now.

It begs a question, naturally, which is “What is the future of the netbook?”.  An enthusiastic netbook user, myself, I wonder whether I might instead substitute a slate if a suitable one were available.  After all, netbook’s are most useful for simple email, web browsing, presentation display and the like. Couldn’t a slate fulfill a similar purpose?  I already find myself reading a substantial amount on the tiny iPhone display – more so today than on my HP Mini netbook.  Would I read even more on a device with a larger and sharper screen which incorporated natural page-turn gestures?

Food for thought, eh?

Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer have a problem.  It’s called the netbook.  These under-powered computers are threatening the most lucrative segment of the PC market today, the laptop.  And, in classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” fashion, the Steves are failing to take the steps required to address the problem.

Apple’s reaction has simply been to deny the viability of the netbook market.  In yesterday’s earnings call Apple honcho Tim Cook said “When I’m looking at what’s sold in the netbook market, I see cramped keyboards, junky hardware, very small screens, bad software. Not a consumer experience that we would put the Mac brand on.”  Ironic, isn’t it?  Cook’s remarks echo IBM’s dismissal of the early personal computer market; the very dismissal which led to the formation of Apple itself.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has responded with Windows 7 Starter Edition – the version of Windows 7 that can only run three applications.  Ed Bott’s assessment aside, it’s hard to see how any ordinary computer user will be happy with a three application limitation.  More to the point, Windows 7 Starter Edition flies in the face of the entire basis upon which Microsoft has been built – that Moore’s Law will continue to bring better and higher powered computing platforms to the masses at lower and lower prices.  Over time, those netbook devices will become powerful general purpose computing platforms.  Indeed, Atom chips are already being deployed in desktops and servers where their power characteristics are generating real savings. 

The netbook phenomenon is driving both of these giants of the personal computing industry to unnatural acts.  Clearly they are worried, and neither have a clue what to do yet. 

The title of Friday’s call was Small Computers vs. Big Phones, and the impetus was an issue of Mark Anderson’s Strategic News Service by the same name.  We talked about the coming “war” between smartphones and netbooks, computing in the cloud, and where the intersection between these devices might occur.

Many people expressed the opinion that we would likely be carrying multiple devices, depending on context, and thus were inclined to dismiss the idea that a war might be coming as hyperbole. 

Nevertheless, there’s certainly jockeying for position going on as TI prepares to ship 1W multi-core processors, operating system vendors duke it out, and the device manufacturers themselves battle for the hearts and minds of consumers. 

Friday’s conference call was recorded on Calliflower.  In attendance: Tim Panton, Carl Ford, Jonathan Greene, Brad Jones, Bill Volk, Jim Courtney, Doug Renert, Kim Dushinski, Barlow Keener, Sheryl Breukrer, Ken Camp, Todd Spraggins, Sergio Meinardi, Misha Nossik, and Aga Magdolen.

 

 Squawk Box Feb 27 [49:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few weeks ago, Mark Anderson’s excellent SNS newsletter (subscription only) carried a piece titled "Small Computers vs. Big Phones – the Next War". I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought at the time that it would make excellent SquawkBox fodder.

The past few weeks have seen nVidia release sophisticated graphics processors for mobile phones, the recognition by the PC industry that the next big wave of devices will be netbook class devices, a deluge of new "smartphones" from the mobile industry, and the announcement of new cloud synchronization initiatives from Microsoft, Nokia and others. It all seems to be pointing to a spectacular convergence of technologies, coupled to an inevitable clash of the titans as vendors battle for the spoils of this convergence.

Join us Friday Feb 27 to discuss. And if you would like a copy of Mark’s newsletter, please leave a comment below with your email address. I will forward it to you, and you will also receive four complementary issues from Mark.

Join the conference call via the Calliflower web conference interface,  or the Calliflower conference call application on Facebook. 

Over the past weekend I picked up one of the new HP Mini 1000 netbooks.  As much as I love my HP DV6000 entertainment laptop with its massive 17″ screen, it is heavy (12 cell battery), near impossible to work with on an airplane without paying for a business class seat or being lucky enough to sit in the exit row, and boots slowly because of all of the software I’ve got loaded onto it.  I needed something simple, small and very portable to complement the beefier computing environment I surround myself with on a day to day basis.  The Mini fills the bill.  With a tiny 10″ screen, no optical drive, a microscopic 60G hard drive, and a tiny 3 cell battery, the Mini weighs just over 2 lbs and is the size of an oversize paperback book.

Despite the small battery, one can comfortably get 2.5 hours of use from a single charge.  HP’s decision to go with the Atom processor rather than the VIA C-7M they used in their previous netbook (the 2133) makes a difference in both power consumption on and performance.

The big advantage of the Mini over other netbooks I looked at from Toshiba and Acer was keyboard size.  With a near full-size keyboard (HP claims 92%) the Mini is a serviceable replacement for a laptop when used for email and some lightweight computing.  It’s enough for the light email I do in front of the television at night, or email and powerpoint presentations on the road.  However, with it’s 1G of RAM, small screen and relatively modest single core processor, you won’t be editing video or photos using this device.  And with 60G of storage space only, that doesn’t leave much room for music.  Better to carry an iPod for that.

The Mini comes with very little software — Windows XP and Microsoft Works — and is blessedly free of the mountains of “free offers” and other shovel-ware that PC manufacturers cram onto their products today.  I removed Works, and added Office 2007 Standard Edition, Skype, Tweetdeck, and Google Chrome.  I also added Microsoft’s Live Mesh (which I find more and more useful every day), and because I have a large number of files I manage under Foldershare which I haven’t migrated to Mesh, Foldershare as well.

Performance, with this minimal set of tools, is excellent.

If you’re lucky enough to live in the US,  the Mini comes with a SIM slot tucked away behind the battery.  Insert a SIM with a broadband data plan, and presto, the Mini becomes an always-on, always-connected device.  Forget about Cafe’s — open the Mini up anywhere that 3G coverage exists, and you’ll be online and working instantly.  I’m hoping we see a similar initiative by Rogers in Canada. The SIM slot is in the device sold in Canada, but the drivers and dial-up software aren’t available.

The Mini is priced at $499 US.  Here in Canada Future Shop sells them for $550.  At that price point, it’s clear that this device is intended as a super mobile companion for another compute environment.  So far, I’m quite impressed.