The Future Of Mobile Tech: Next Year's Notebooks Will Be Worth Waiting ForThe Future Of Mobile Tech: Next Year's Notebooks Will Be Worth Waiting For

Big notebooks are getting bigger

Notebook displays are going Hollywood

Small notebooks will continue to shrink

Wireless use will continue to expand

It's getting easier to be green

Storage is going solid-state

More notebooks may mean less Windows

This spurt of technological creativity may be due, at least in part, to the increasing popularity of notebooks. Experts expect that desktop PCs will still outsell laptops in 2008 -- but by less than they did in 2007. Laptop sales are growing 19 percent a year, says the analyst firm Gartner, Inc., and 2010 will actually be the tipping point when notebooks finally outsell desktops. Corporations and emerging economies are still buying desktops, says Gartner Research vice president Leslie Fiering, a mobile computing specialist, "but for consumers we're seeing the crossover."

So what kind of technology shifts can you expect for next year's notebooks?

1

Big Notebooks Are Getting Bigger

While an emphasis on mobility means that the downsizing of notebooks will continue over the next year, there's news at the other end of the spectrum as well: notebooks are getting bigger.

The trend toward these supersized portables is already clear in notebooks like the Acer 9810 (17.1 pounds), the Dell XPS M2010 (18.3 pounds), and the HP Pavilion HDX (15.5 pounds). All three have 20.1-inch screens and offer features like increased storage (320GB and up) with RAID controllers, Dolby surround sound, remote controls, and the kind of graphics support and video performance specs that will make gamers drool -- at prices that start around $3,000. These machines all run Intel T7000-series Centrino Core 2 Duo processors, with power consumption in the 34-watt range, typical for notebooks, but not exactly low-power. That and the power demands of the huge screens will mean they'll seldom be unplugged.

They'll replace desktops, says Gartner's Fiering, and they'll be used primarily as media centers and gaming machines: "We're seeing increasingly cool features in these big machines: TV tuners, personal video recorders, better audio and graphics. And the graphics performance and the compute power continue to make these high-end PCs great gaming machines."

Quad-core notebooks will also emerge as a category over the next year. The pioneering models like Clevo's D900C (rebranded in the U.S. as the Sager NP9260 and XtremeNotebooks' Xtreme 917V), are built on Intel's Core 2 Quad processors and come with 17-inch screens and dual graphics cards. With a full weight of 12 pounds and price tags that begin well above $2,000, these notebooks are not for every user, but gamers are paying attention.

2

Notebook Displays Are Going Hollywood

The most noticeable change in notebooks over the past couple of years has been the move to wide screens. The classic notebook screen for a long time was a14-inch diagonal display in VGA format -- a width-to-height ratio of 1.33 to 1 (or 4:3) TV-screen dimensions.

Super VGA and XGA added resolution, but kept the same ratio. However, TV is changing over the next couple of years to high-definition displays with a panoramic screen: HDTV uses a 1.78:1 screen, and PC displays are following suit. WXGA displays have standardized at 1366 x 768-pixel resolution, a 1.78:1 ratio.

At the same time, screen sizes have narrowed slightly to keep notebooks about the same width; the result is that the 12.1-inch widescreen display will be the mainstream standard for notebooks over the next year.

This will not affect notebook width and height, which will stay about 8.5 x by 11 (the size of a paper notebook), constrained by the ergonomics of keyboards and screens. However, they will get thinner along the z-axis toward the end of next year, predicts Fiering, as components like the hard disk continue to slim down.

Another display-related technology change will also contribute to this slimming-down effect, according to Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product marketing for Fujitsu: LED backlit displays. Backlighting in a notebook works like a slide projector: the liquid crystal display is turned on or off pixel by pixel, allowing light from behind the display to shine through it or not. Notebook backlights for years have been basically fluorescent lamps, excited to luminescence by a high-voltage current. The current is provided by an inverter, a sort of transformer the width of the screen that steps up the notebook's current to drive the backlight.

LEDs, however, run on notebook power, so the weight and space taken by the inverter can be saved, and the mounting and mullion around the screen can be slimmed down. "A notebook that previously had a 13.3-inch screen," Moore explains, "can move to a 14-inch screen in the same case." Or, if you want to save size and weight, the same size screen can go into a smaller case.

Richard Brown, director of international marketing for chipmaker VIA, agrees that 12-inch notebooks are going to be a sweet spot in the market over the next year -- especially as they get better equipped with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drives, Bluetooth and WAN support, and similar features. (The interest in the 12-inch form factor may be one reason for the recurring rumor that Apple will reintroduce a 12-inch model into its MacBook Pro notebook line.)

Overall, performance of notebooks in the 12- to 15-inch class won't change much. The boost provided by dual-core processor technology has pretty well spread through the notebook market. Manufacturers will be consolidating their gains by offering more models and choices and trying to improve battery life. New chipsets like Intel's Santa Rosa platform (now renamed the Centrino Pro) are as much about power-management as they are about raw compute power.

3

Small Notebooks Will Continue To Shrink

Twelve-inch screens aren't a lower limit, by any means. Ultra-mobile PCs are on everybody's radar, even if everybody doesn't agree what a UMPC is.

What they've been so far has been frankly experimental. The early examples have included the Samsung Q1 with a 7-inch screen, the Fujitsu U810 with a 5.6-inch screen, and the Palm Foleo with a 10-inch screen and a touch-typist's keyboard. And there will be a lot more experimentation to come next year.

There are a couple of ways to look at UMPCs. One is that they're a continuation of the downsizing of notebooks. Gartner's Fiering sees them as devices for "walking workers" -- nurses, lab techs, even delivery-truck drivers -- who can take advantage of their touchscreen support to provide a migration path from larger tablet machines.

Another viewpoint is to see UMPCs as an upsizing of extremely small devices (smartphones and PDAs and Pocket PCs) with tiny screens and no keyboards. Web browsing is becoming the primary function of any device with a display screen, and larger UMPC devices, with screens big enough to read, and keyboards big enough to use, look like winners. This matches Paul Moore's vision of an "unconsciously portable" device -- something so small and light you'll carry it everywhere, yet big enough that you can see the screen, type on the keyboard, use your familiar productivity applications, and connect to your company network.

The Holy Grail of UMPC design -- small enough but big enough, portable but usable - may not be found in 2008. The limitation of small batteries, tiny hard drives, reduced-speed processors, and screens that range from small to smaller, means that UMPCs won't find mass-market acceptance next year. Fiering predicts that we're a year away from better prices and two years away from hardware designs and features that will make UMPCs an established category.

VIA's Richard Brown splits UMPCs into two groups on either side of what he calls the "6-inch divide." Above that screen size he sees devices with screens about 7 inches on the diagonal, and standard keyboards. It's here, he says, that his company's low-power processors are currently finding enthusiastic customers.

Below the 6-inch divide are devices with screens 5 inches and smaller that will have thumb keyboards and stylus-driven interfaces. "The OQO is an example," he says. "These little machines are strong on connectivity -- some U.S. models have EV-DO -- and data-handling and browsing are very good. Power consumption needs to be improved."

"You'll see five-inch screens next year," says Brown, "then smaller. It's a two- to three-year trend, it won't happen overnight." But the end result will be a convergence of these ultra-mobile devices with smartphones like the iPhone and the recently announced Open Moko Linux platform.

4

Wireless Use Will Continue To Expand

Wireless connectivity is already nearly universal in laptops. Right now that means the 802.11g standard. But over the next year, the move to 802.11n, with its greater range and higher throughput, will begin in earnest.

While certification of the 802.11n standard isn't expected before mid-2008, manufacturers and the WiFi Alliance have pushed a cross-compatibility validation program for equipment based on Draft 2 of the specification. As a result, the move to 11n is starting -- there are some computer makers, like Apple, that are 100% in the 11n camp already. Overall, only 10% of WLAN cards are 802.11n today, but in 2008 there will be a fairly heavy shift, according to Michael Hurlston, vice president and general manager for chipmaker Broadcomm's wireless LAN division: "Over the next year we'll go from 10% 11n / 90% 11g to something like 40% 11n / 60% 11g."

It's an application-driven change, he says, pushed by data-server applications and media streaming, and it will enable PC makers to offer software that takes advantage of the ability to move lots of bits through the air: video capture, video streaming, and similar media programs. (This move to 802.11n will affect desktop PCs, as well, according to Hurlston: "Something like 15 percent of desktop PCs come with WLAN installed, but with 802.11n, that will rise to 30% over the next year.")

Other wireless technologies are competing for real estate inside PCs, too; specifically, Bluetooth and wide-area networking (WAN). WLAN chipsets are having to shove over to make room for these new technologies, according to Hurlston. WLAN chips are traditionally installed in notebooks in a mini-card form factor with a PCI Express bus connector, but manufacturers like Broadcomm are being forced to use smaller cards, or are doubling up technologies, building combination chipsets and cards that do both WLAN and Bluetooth.

Bluetooth support in laptops will mushroom next year. "Bluetooth is now on 20 to 25 percent of laptops," Hurlston says, "and that will increase to 50 percent by the end of next year." A big part of the reason is that the combined chips and cards not only ease the space squeeze, they drive the cost down.

Wide-area networking services like EV-DO and Edge from the mobile providers like AT&T, Sprint, ,and T-Mobile will be built into perhaps 10 or 15 percent of laptops next year, as well, says Hurlston. It's increasingly interesting to PC users who want to stay connected, he adds, and (perhaps just as importantly) it's a good business model for the laptop makers that get a bounty on customers they deliver to the mobile service providers. So it justifies pushing the business by installing WAN support in upscale notebooks for the corporate market, and increasingly in consumer notebooks.

Gartner's Leslie Fiering draws a strategic distinction between WAN support that's embedded in notebooks and external WAN cards. "The notebook vendors are pushing embedded WAN because it makes them money," she says, "but embedded technology makes service changes more difficult."

WAN service requires you pick a service provider and sign a contract, and often the WAN network hardware built into a notebook limits the buyer to a single provider. "And while service contracts run for two years, people are keeping their laptops for three, so there's a mismatch there, as well," she points out. "We're leery of embedded WAN for users who aren't sure how they'll use it. External WAN cards are a better bet: It's a $100 card, but you don't give up the whole notebook to change your service provider."

There is, however a downside to cards, as well. Most WAN cards come in PC Card format, and PC Card slots were supposed to be replaced by the newer PC Express card format, but the transition has been slow coming because there are so many legacy cards. "We're seeing both PC card and PC Express slots in enterprise machines to deal with this problem," says Fiering. "Consumers have been slow to make the change because of the legacy cards, but they'll start next year."

5

It's Getting Easier To Be Green

As notebooks shrink, batteries must necessarily shrink with them, and that makes it tough to extend battery life. The small batteries in pioneering UMPCs like the Samsung Q1 and Fujitsu's recently-announced U810 are rated at 6 hours or so -- and as with all battery specs from vendors, that seems optimistic.

Manufacturers are tackling the power problem from all angles, says Paul Moore. "Previously everybody was looking for a better battery, and they didn't see what was under their noses: The answer is to build a computer that uses less battery, one that manages resources better."

Even standard technologies are going green. Intel's Centrino Pro is expected to dominate laptop designs through the early part of next year. Intel's roadmap for the Centrino Pro is as much about energy savings as it is about performance. The chip does several tricks to save power, including optional flash-memory caching called Turbo Memory, and independent power management for dual-core CPUs that can turn off a core when it's not needed. In the first half of next year Intel will move to power-thrifty 45-nanometer chip technology with the Penryn processor line, and later in the year the follow-on to the Centrino Pro, the Montevina platform, will further reduce power consumption.

AMD, which has been late to the mobile processor party, has several projects in the works that will result in lower power consumption, but most of them aren't expected until 2009. Next year it will ship a dual-core processor code-named Griffin, part of a notebook platform code-named Puma, the company's first design effort targeted exclusively at the notebook market.

Things will get much more interesting for AMD in 2010, when its Fusion chips are expected to come to market -- single-chip processors that merge a CPU (with up to four cores) and a graphics processor. AMD is also developing an ultra-low-power CPU architecture code-named Bobcat for mobile devices such as UMPCs and consumer electronics products. Bobcat will consume just one to 10 watts of power. But you'll have to wait until 2009.

Low-power x86 processors present an opportunity for other CPU makers as the market for UMPCs, smartphones, and digital TVs grows.

Intel will ship a new processor, code-named Silverthorne, for these devices in the first half of next year.

VIA Technologies, Inc. makes the C7-M Ultra Low Voltage processor that consumes as little 3.5 watts of power, and has released the Nanobook, a reference design for a UMPC built around this processor. In mid-August, the company announced an even lower-powered line of processors, the Eden ULV chips, which will run on as little as one watt.

Marvell is another major player in the low-power processor market. It bought Intel's XScale CPU line last fall, and an XScale processor drives the Palm Foleo.

(Incidentally, "green" doesn't just mean "low-power." Most PC manufacturers have pledged to eliminate toxic materials from their products and have launched recycling programs to reclaim old equipment.)

6

Storage Is Going Solid-State

For two decades, PC data storage has meant hard disk drives, but big changes are coming quickly. Solid-state flash memory -- the same technology used in thumb drives and storage cards for digital cameras -- will begin to make inroads on notebooks next year.

Better performance is a primary reason, according to Paul Moore. "Turbo memory, ReadyBoost, hybrid hard drives, solid state drives -- these will boost performance by reducing latency, and by not spinning the drive so much, they'll conserve power," he says. Flash already plays several roles in a PC. Microsoft Vista's "ReadyBoost" and "ReadyDrive" can use USB drives and hybrid hard drives (HHDs) that combine flash cache with rotating-disk storage as a cache to speed up boot-ups and application loading. Intel uses flash memory for an internal cache called Turbo Memory in its Centrino PRo platform. Solid-state drives (SSDs) replace moving parts completely.

The cost of a substantial helping of flash storage is still higher than a similar amount of rotating disk, but the price of flash memory has dropped rapidly over the past couple of years and continues to fall. In January of this year, SanDisk unveiled a 32GB SSD drive the company estimated would add $600 to the price of a laptop, or about $19 a gigabyte. But in just three months, when it announced a version with a serial ATA interface, the price had fallen to $350 wholesale.

Solid-state drives are getting bigger, as well. In June, 2007, San Disk and Samsung both launched 64GB SSDs for notebook PCs. Fujitsu's Moore says that, by the end of 2008, he expects to see affordable SSD storage in capacities that will be reaching 100GB, at a price that will drop rapidly as they become more popular. Analyst organization IDC is bullish on solid-state drives: It predicts that the market for SSD will grow at a 71% annual rate for the next five years.

Dell was one of the first notebook makers to offer SSDs: In April, 2007, it began shipping the Latitude D420 and D620 ATG notebooks with 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk solid state drives. Next year both SanDisk and Dell will find they have a great deal of competition -- storagesearch.com lists 26 makers of SSDs in the standard 2.5-inch notebook drive form factor; more, it notes, than the number of companies that make 2.5-inch hard drives.

Given the cost premium, SSDs won't be a consumer item next year, says Leslie Fiering, but they will have a quick impact, as SSD pays for itself almost immediately in durability in the bump-and-drop environments where tablets are used.

The vast majority of next year's notebooks will have hard drives, of course, but there will be change here, as well -- they'll likely have bigger ones. Last year, 60GB or 80GB was the sweet spot for laptop drives. That won't change much for mid-size and smaller notebooks, particularly as they slim down. But by next year, says Fujitsu's Paul Moore, 2.5-inch drives with capacities around 250GB will begin to appear in laptops that can accommodate them: the desktop replacements and supersized media machines.

7

More Notebooks May Mean Less Windows

Along with hard drives, there's been another constant in the notebook market: Microsoft Windows. But even here, change may be coming. This year, one in seven notebooks sold in the United States ran an OS other than Windows: the Mac OS X. Apple's share of the notebook PC market increased dramatically this year, and with the impending release of the Leopard version of the OS, it's on track to continue growing next year.

Linux made gains this year, as well, as first Dell and then Lenovo announced they would sell notebooks with Linux loaded, citing customer demand. The upcoming Palm Foleo runs a Linux distro from Wind River, as well.

The Foleo, in fact, may be the clearest indicator so far of a relationship between changes in the hardware and changes in the operating system. The Foleo has no hard drive. It uses flash for storage, with a relatively small amount (much smaller than a SSD) built in and card connectors for more. It's an instant-on device, and the user interface is non-windowing -- only one application can be open at a time. (It works very much like a Palm PDA, in fact.)

All these design factors work together to hold down the demand for computer power, which means the Foleo can run well on a low-power, low-speed processor -- which means it doesn't need a fan, either. No hard disk, no fan, and a low-power processor all add up to maximize the battery life. And that in turn means that a device with a total weight of 2.5 pounds and a list price of $600 can pack enough battery power to light up a 10-inch screen for five hours, according to the spec sheet. (This year you can buy notebooks with similar specs, like the Sony Vaio VGN TXN15P , but you'll pay almost four times as much.)

Linux is also fostering innovation in other areas. Leslie Fiering is very interested in the XO notebook from the One Laptop Per Child project. "Its Linux-based UI for kids is much more intuitive," she says. "This kind of specialized interface for users is one of the pluses you can get from Linux."

Linux isn't for everybody, she admits, "especially for Windows people who have their applications and know how to use them." But the operating system will be one more subject of experimentation for notebook makers over the next year.

Conclusions

"The problem is figuring out what the big winner will be," says Richard Brown. "It's a bit tricky to predict, like the iPhone in the phone market, where Apple came from left field."

Next year, as this year, the safe bets will be on incremental improvements:lighter ("six pounds is the new eight pounds," as Paul Moore put it); brighter, with LED backlighting technology; more power-thrifty with the Centrino Plus platform; better performing with Turbo Memory; or a hybrid hard drive to give Windows Vista a little kick.

One area for experimentation next year will be secondary screens, Fiering predicts, either beside the main screen or in the lid. There's support for the concept in Windows Vista's Sideshow features, but, she says, vendors are reluctant because the users aren't familiar with it. "But it will come because vendors need innovations like these to keep their margins up. Otherwise notebooks are becoming pretty standard."

Finally, style may play a bigger role in your purchase decision next year, according to Moore, who cites HP's success with its designer laptops and sees an analogy to 1954, when "GE introduced the first color appliances, and people started designing kitchens."

Bottom line: if you were hoping that 2008 might bring that 8-hour, 1.5-pound, connect-to-anything, $500 notebook, it looks like you may have to wait a little longer. But there will be a lot of interesting tweaks that will make next year's notebooks worth waiting for. And keep your eye on left field.