Notebooks: The Next Generation
The machine was sleek, measuring 0.76 inches at its widest and tapering down to 0.12 inches. It weighed about 3 pounds. It was shiny. Its keyboard lit up. It had a solid-state hard drive so it would run silently. Its glossy screen was just plain pretty. And, when Jobs opened it, it looked as if he could have been opening a magazine.
With the MacBook Air, the notebook world found its fashionista—a notebook for movers and shakers who want a light, fully functional PC and who also want to be the envy of everyone else in the airport lounge.
Meanwhile, across the country, Lenovo was working on the anti-MacBook Air, the ThinkPad W700. If the MacBook Air is like a butterfly, the ThinkPad W700 is like a tiger.
With dual hard drives, quad-core processors and a 17-inch screen with a built-in color calibrator, this beast is no show-off. It's a powerhouse, designed for photographers and digital video professionals who need power, storage and don't need to cart the almost 10-pound machine between meetings.
Thinner and lighter, or heavier and more powerful? You choose. With notebook computers now, the sky's the limit.
Evolutionary Trends
Notebooks are putting the personal back in personal computer, and vendors are tailoring their products to suit niche markets, taking the standard form-factor for the notebook computer and blowing it out of the water with innovation, options and power.
And as notebooks evolve into more personalized, more niche products while simultaneously becoming the mainstream PC form factor, where does the opportunity for VARs lie and how can you harness the variety of options to make more successful, targeted sales?
And while the consumer market offers things like faux-bamboo casings and scented notebooks, where is innovation in the business world?
"Notebooks are evolving like cars. Back in the day, cars were pretty much meant for transportation, and now if you look at cars, they're designed for style and the way they're being used. Today you're seeing hybrids and everything else, and I think you're seeing notebook computers follow a similar trail," said Wes Williams, worldwide ThinkPad marketing manager for Lenovo, Research Triangle Park, N.C.
"You're seeing a trend to very, very small, lightweight, long-battery-life computers like the ThinkPad S10 that we announced," Williams said. "There's certainly a category of people like that that want a machine [they] can put in their pocketbooks. On the other end of the spectrum, you're seeing other types of verticals come up where people need machines to do different things."
Lenovo, for example, designed the ThinkPad W700 for digital content creators and worked with professionals in the industry to determine which features and which form-factors they wanted, like a 17-inch high-end screen, a color calibrator and serious processing power with the option of an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.
While some machines are getting bigger, others, like the MacBook Air and the Toughbook U1 ultra-mobile rugged PC, are getting smaller.
Panasonic Computer Solutions Co., known as the industry's leader in ruggedized mobile computers, launched the Toughbook U1 this year, giving the world its first fully functional rugged computer that you can fit in the palm of your hand.
With a miniature full keyboard and weighing in at about 2 pounds, it uses Intel's Atom processor and can run Microsoft Windows and Windows-based applications like any desktop computer. It's also ruggedized to exceed the military's standards for ruggedness. Optional features include a bar code scanner and a camera.
As with the ThinkPad W700, users drive innovation at Panasonic, said Kyp Walls, director of product management at Panasonic.
"The reason we do anything that we do is because customers have told us that's important to them. We first integrated a camera into a notebook at the behest of a government agency that was needing to take a lot of pictures along with estimates they were doing and reports they were doing," Walls said.
Next: Hits And Misses Hits And Misses
But adding and subtracting and choosing which features should be included in a product isn't a simple matter, and companies do have hits and misses.
At one point, Lenovo put connectors—like USB and display ports—on the lid of a notebook PC model. Not popular. When it got rid of the serial port, users complained. "So we added the option where the optical bay is, we can put a thing in there and put the serial port in instead of the optical bay and we sold like 300 of these options. Nobody bought it even once we had it," said Howard Locker, director of new technologies for Lenovo.
"We put it out there after people really wanted it, but they didn't buy it. The marketplace is the final arbitrator," he said.
Panasonic's misses include a dual display that could face two users and a wearable computer that strapped onto your chest with a display that attached to your head. "You could look at it with one eye. People generally thought that was a little too Robocop-ish for users to wear," Walls said.
Sometimes, success takes vendors by surprise.
Locker said Lenovo didn't anticipate the popularity of the fingerprint reader feature. "When we first did the fingerprint reader we thought it would be like 2 percent [of the market], and it wound up being like 85 percent ... people liked it not so much for security, but for convenience. It's much easier to swipe your finger than to remember all your passwords. I just swipe my finger. I don't even know what my password is," he said.
When it comes to what's possible with notebooks, companies like Fujitsu are pushing the envelope with concept designs that, like concept cars, spark the imagination.
Fujitsu's concept Fabric PC breaks new ground with what's possible. "If you look at a PC and why is it such a rigid square, it's because of the display," said Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product marketing at Fujitsu.
The concept notebook is based on electronic paper with a flexible display. "When you get to something like organic LEDs ones you can bend, twist or fold your form factor can be almost anything," he said.
The Amazon Kindle reader, for example, is "neat but it's still a square," Moore said. "What if I could put that in a tube like a cigar tube, and then snap it back? It would be a lot easier. You could do that with electronic paper it's an example of what you could do when the technology gets there."
Next: Designs For Business Designs For Business
Meanwhile back on Earth, for the enterprise user, design and features that make doing business easier are taking precedence over processing power, said Robert Baker, manager of business notebook product marketing for Hewlett-Packard Corp.
"We're hearing from customers that design matters more now than it has in the past. We used to never hear that design matters, and in the last two years we've heard loud and clear that design matters," he said.
But HP is taking a cautious approach to design, trying to create machines that will be as attractive to business users in 2011 as they are today.
"You can't jump on the latest fad or whatever, like color, is resonating at the time because these are business notebooks. They will speak volumes about the person carrying them, and they have to be able to stand up to three years on the road. The design has to look as good three years from now as it does today," Baker said.
With that in mind, HP designed its EliteBook enterprise notebook PC line, launched in June, which incorporates features like business-card readers that can scan business cards and port the information into Microsoft Outlook. Users can use HP's QuickLook 2 to view a cached version of their Outlook calendar, contacts and e-mail in 10 seconds without having to boot their PCs when they're off.
HP's SpareKey feature allows users to reset their own passwords after answering three security questions, eliminating the need for an IT manager to intervene and reset forgotten passwords.
"It's just another feature that allows people to continue doing business without downtime and to make their lives easier," Baker said.
Dell has been able to extend battery life on some of its business notebook PCs to 19 hours, according to Brett McAnally, director of commercial notebooks. Dell's Latitude "ON" feature allows users to access Outlook information without booting their notebooks. Dell's Latitude line of notebook PCs for business users is also available in several colors.
Doing More With Less
So, which features will survive?
"In a few years, there will be certain form factors that will live and some that won't, and it will stabilize like desktops have done," Baker said. "But today the desire for mobility is paramount and the customer base is pushing us to do anything we can to bring more mobile products to market."
The education market has been the recipient of much of the industry's innovation when it comes to shrinking the notebook PC with the launch of the netbook PC—miniature notebooks designed for lightweight use and Internet browsing. Asus has seen success with its EEE PC. HP launched the 2133 MiniNote PC. Dell recently brought the Inspiron Mini 9 to market to compete in the space.
"That category is really heating up and you're seeing a lot of people come in to that," HP's Baker said. "Regardless of where the market goes, that education need is there and we're still hitting the mark with that product. It's going to evolve over the next year and it's going to get even cooler."
The netbook is yet another example of the evolution of form and function to meet a customer need in a specific vertical market.
"I think by designing for specific markets, we are tailoring products for resellers to go out and wrap a solution around [them] for a specific customer," Baker said. "There are certain partners out there who are really good in education, some do SMB sales, some are more health-care driven.
Those partners are really able to go out and sell to the customer a product designed for you with the service and support that a dedicated partner can provide. This gives them a hook, a reason to talk to the customer, with a product designed for their needs."
And VARs are integral to the success of all notebook vendors.
"The technology is there. The design is there. The formfactors are there. The things we're putting in the box are targeted to customer needs, but the total solution you wrap around that product has to be there," Baker said. "You can't just put out a notebook and say here's a low-cost notebook and go distribute it and be happy. There's a lot of support that has to go with that."
Next: From Pipe Dream To Mainstream FROM PIPE DREAM TO MAINSTREAM
Kyp Walls, director of product management for ToughBook maker Panasonic Computer Solutions, knows notebook computers. He's been working in the industry since the notebook was born and has seen it develop from a pipe dream into the mainstream form factor for personal computers allowing you to run your life from any airport lounge.
But as we all know notebooks didn't always have the bells and whistles they come with today, like built-in Web cams, Wi-Fi connectivity and DVD-ROM drives. In fact, just being able to unplug a computer was novel when the notebook was first taken off the grid.
"I feel like I've got a little bit of history on my side," Walls said. He started with Toshiba back in 1991 when the company was putting out some of the world's first notebook computers. "The first battery-operated ones were pretty big and bulky, 13- to 15-pound kind of things."
In the early 1990s, the notebook form factor began to trim down into 7- to 8-pound, battery-operated machines that could fit into a briefcase and be used on the go.
"In the early days, just the idea that you could carry around a notebook actually was important," Walls said. He was part of a team that worked on the first active matrix color notebook in 1993.
"That was a huge deal at the time. It was wickedly expensive. The screen was very small and it was out of stock for the entire time the product was in production. We couldn't make them fast enough even though they were very expensive. The display on that was 8.4 inches, and people were flabbergasted that we had a display that big and beautiful on a notebook computer," Walls said.
The advent of the 56K modem helped spur notebook popularity as on-the-go users could now connect to the blossoming Internet. "That's when everybody could build in a modem because you didn't have to worry that modem speeds would get faster and people would be upset," he said.
—Jennifer Lawinski