Another busy week at Mobile Tech Manor that saw a hot new netbook get announced. I was impressed by the HP Mini 1000 but is it the cat’s meow? Not a lot of new gear appeared at my door which gave me time to work with the existing toolkit and spend some quality time with it. There was also a fair bit of time to reflect on mobile technology and come to some surprising conclusions. I think handheld PCs are now a thing of the past, which surprises me. Come on in and let’s visit a spell.
Another week, another netbook
HP shook things up this week with the introduction of the HP Mini 1000 which I got to spend some quality time with at the HP office. The build quality and aesthetic design is first rate and it is easily the most attractive netbook I have seen. How attractive a netbook is is not something that usually factors high on my criteria list but it seems to be important to many. The 1000 will not disappoint those folks for sure.
HP made a lot of design choices that have disappointed some I have heard from and that’s understandable. The decision to drop down from a high res display to the standard netbook res of 1024×600 has angered quite a few people. I too wish they had retained the higher res but I understand why they didn’t. Their decision to go with a 1.8-inch hard drive has limited them to the maximum 60 GB capacity and that’s quite a bit smaller than competing netbooks. Both of those decisions were not easy for HP to make given my conversation with them but to keep the 1000 as small and thin as it is and to reach the low price point they must reach they felt them necessary so that’s what they did. I am not a notebook maker so I can’t argue against the decisions they made, they are what they are. I do think it’s a pretty nice netbook in any event and let’s see how long it takes the creative netbook enthusiasts to start hacking it to deal with some of these decisions.
Are handheld computers (MIDs) irrelevant?
I spent a fair amount of time thinking about handheld PCs this week and reached some surprising conclusions. Before I share those I should set the stage for this thought process so it makes more sense, at least I hope it will. Kevin and I were having one of our many chats and we started talking about the Aigo MID that has recently appeared. The discussion was a very eye-opening one for me as it made me think back to my first handheld, the Sony U50. That handheld PC was the very first one in my opinion that kicked off the whole handheld PC thing as it was truly a no-compromise PC running Windows XP yet would still fit in the hand. I have written reams about the Sony U during the time I used it as one of my main computers for well over a year and you can review that if you question how much utility it provided me.
I still miss the Sony U occasionally and wish I still had it. There is something not only cool but very useful to have a full PC in your hand. Sure there are compromises due to the small size but the design of the U minimized them sufficiently. I accomplished so much with the U during that time and I thought about that a lot. I realized that while I had been very excited about the MIDs when they were first hitting the tech discussion that I have been losing that enthusiasm recently. The Aigo review at Pocketables confirmed that loss of enthusiasm and I finally realized why that is.
I’ve always been a handheld computing nut so I asked myself if the Sony U was just being introduced today would I be as excited about it as I was back then. I was pretty shocked when I realized that while the geek in me would be happy to see it I wouldn’t think that it could play a major role in my mobile life as it did back then. That set me back a fair bit, I assure you. So I set out to ponder why that is and I came to the conclusion that times have changed and technology has evolved to the point where the handheld PC is not as relevant as it was back then. Why is that? Well, the emergence of the smartphone is why.
I’m not talking about any single smartphone either, I’m considering the entire field. You have to remember that back four or five years ago when the Sony U appeared there were not really any smartphones out there. There were no phones that had decent web browsers to make surfing the web enjoyable. No phones had WiFi to provide fast connectivity and 3G was only a twinkle in some engineers’ eyes. At that point in time the Sony U, a handheld PC, was the only option for someone like me who needed a handheld portal to the online world. It provided me unrestricted access to email, it gave me the ability to search online for information and the computing power to do something with that information. There was really no other way to have the mobile connectivity I needed and that’s why it made such a big deal to me back then.
That has now changed with the growth of WiFi and 3G networks which are easily tapped while on the go. There are many smartphone devices to choose from that provide a great deal of the online needs for most people, myself included. Smartphone browsers are now very good at providing a decent online experience and most smartphones have very good email capabilities out of the box. We can stay connected no matter what by using the phone in our pocket. Sure there are compromises involved in interacting with that information but those are largely the same compromises we’ve always faced using handheld devices.
That’s why I think that MIDs are doomed to failure, they no longer bring capability to the mobile worker that we can’t get on a good smartphone. If MIDs had appeared two or three years ago they would have taken the world by storm but technology wasn’t in place to allow that to happen. They are just starting to appear now and I don’t see them bringing any capability that we don’t already have with the smartphone in our pocket. The time for MIDs has passed, and we can blame the phone for that.
Will the smartphone be the mobile computer of the future?
This brings me to question: will the smartphone become the primary mobile computing platform of the future? Some very smart people, much smarter than I believe so. I saw an interview of our good friend Steve Rubel who believes that smartphones will replace laptops for the mobile worker in the next few years. I think that’s a bit simplistic and while I respect Steve’s views I don’t agree with them for the simple reason that smartphones suffer from the same compromises that handheld PCs have always had that prevents that from happening. We will still need notebooks that supply a bigger screen to interact with more information at once and we will need the keyboard for content creation. Handheld PCs, even my old faithful Sony U suffered from the same restrictions as smartphones do today and that won’t change. There is simply no substitute for having a high resolution screen to consume information and a decent keyboard to allow better interaction with that information. That hasn’t changed and it won’t be changing any time soon. Sorry Steve, but I think I’m right about this.
Enter the netbook
That need for ultimate mobility coupled with the desire to consume more information than a smartphone makes possible is in my opinion the reason for the explosion of the netbook. Netbooks have the same utility as a bigger notebook but are far more portable due to the reduced size. The 9 or 10-inch screen on the netbook presents the near perfect compromise between portability and utility and that is readily apparent to folks who see them. That’s why they are exploding in sales numbers and why regular consumers are snapping them up in large numbers. Sure the low prices (compared to notebooks) helps in that regard but the portability is the key factor here. Some netbooks cost the same or even less than some smartphones out there today so given the choice between the phone and the netbook to get mobile work done folks will choose (and are choosing) the netbook.
Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying consuming online information with smartphones. I am in a unique position to try many different models and they can and do offer quite decent experiences for working online. The iPhone is a great online tool and I am finding the T-Mobile G1 Android phone to be quite capable in that regard as well. But they all suffer from the ability to interact with that online information and they greatly fall short when it comes time to create content and that’s where netbooks are so strong.
eBook of the week
This week I have picked up another Dean Koontz ebook that is pretty good and I am enjoying thoroughly. Hideaway is a riveting tale of a man killed in a car accident who is reanimated due to advances in medical technology. He doesn’t come through unscathed however, and this is where the story gets so good. I won’t spoil it for you but if you like Koontz you’ll love Hideaway.
Wrap-up
I am out of time again and I hope you enjoyed my ramblings about mobile tech. Remember that these are simply my opinions and yours may very well be different, that’s what makes them opinions. We are all entitled to our own opinions and there are no right nor wrong ones. I would love to hear your take on the mobile handheld computing future though. It’s an exciting time in this area for sure.
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