Exclusive: Apple to adopt Intel's ultra-mobile PC platform - Page 5

The main mobile computers are laptops which generally only have 1.5 to 4 hours of battery life so any jacket pocket device with at least 3-4 hours would still sell. Of course 12 hours would be great but as long as the battery was removable lower hours of battery would not prevent people from buying them.

Clamshell designs such as the old Psion 5mx or Revo were only .90" thick and easily fit into any jacket pocket without causing any bulge. If you never owned one or used one, they had a unique expanding keyboard that when opened provided a keyboard that I was able to type about 55-65 wpm which is about 85% of my desktop speeds yet it was only 6.9" x 3.6" x .90" in size.

Yes it is great to have huge memory but as long as it has enough memory to hold all of the typical office applications and room for at least a good handful of third party softwares it would still sell as files could be stored on removable usb, cf/sd cards, etc. Remember there has never been a pocket laptop so it does not have to be as full blown as the top of the line laptops to gain a lot of sales.

If Apple just makes a larger version of their Iphone and it does not really a true computer for applications, etc. then I see it as a gimick toy that will not be as popular unless is is ultra cheap.

Too small of a keyboard. Too small of a screen. There were some serious attempts at creating this nano-sized laptop market (Psion's and HP Jornada), and they failed to catch on. One can attribute the implementation failing because of economic reasons or company mismanagement, but there were a lot of clamshell devices like the Psion floating around and they couldn't survive. That tells me there was and is a usability / market issue. (The fact there isn't a company willing to produce such a niche product at a profitable price today is also interesting. Perhaps there are non-trivial OS expenditures to make the device work.)

The yet to be successful UMPC class devices also seem to indicate market conditions haven't arrived for such a device yet. Like I said with Dave, my clamshell device is really an ultraportable laptop, the smallest that can be made yet maintain the size of the keyboard. Something on the order of 10 x 5.5 x <1 inch with a 10 inch 1280 x 720 screen and normal OS X. It may not be jacket pocket size, but it will be almost MacBook usable with the benefit of more mobility. If priced right, it shouldn't cannibalize MacBook sales and it should serve a market of its own (ultra-mobile & secondary / complimentary computer). If a price can't be found, it'll suffer the same fate as Psion / Jornada.


Picture of the device:


Um, that's not a mass market device. It may not even be a niche device. It's a novelty. At least in America, I think it is at best a novelty. Perhaps in Korea / Japan it has an actual niche market. It's got too many folds and mechanisms for my taste. I don't think it'll even be that portable as I think it would be 1.5" thick folded up. That ain't jacket pocket sized.


McCaslin is already in use in some UMPCs. It's just an ULV Pentium M with the usual support chipsets, and uses too much juice for UMPCs really. It's just odd that hardly any UMPCs have the Psion clamshell form factor. That should tell you they think UMPC = tablet functionality, not nano-laptop. Menlow on the other hand, which has a "new" x86 architecture (Silverthorne) specifically designed for ultra-mobile devices, is much more suitable for UMPCs.

Well, like has been said, anything else is a tweener device that doesn't seem to have mass market appeal. It either has to be small enough to fit in your hand or big enough to be as usable as a laptop. I went for the smallest possible laptop with a full laptop keyboard idea. If it is UMPC sized, I'm not sure what it would do better than a handheld or a laptop.

Now, it seems the Nokia N800/810 is popular, so there may be a market now for such a device, but lets wait and see. The market where internet access and a web browser is all that is wanted.


Power isn't a big deal. If Apple can cram 5 hours of video life into an 80 GB iPod classic at 0.41" thick, I don't think they'll have a problem with a bigger device. Not sure what you mean by performance.


Well, which device are we talking about? My MacBook thin? That should have a HDD. A UMPC? That should have a HDD. Heck, I think the iPhone should have an HDD version. The only suitable flash only device is nano and shuffle sized devices. Everything above it can accommodate HDD. There really shouldn't be a flash versus HDD battle for Apple, they should just know that both are viable markets.

Disk drives will have a 5 to 10x $/GB advantage to flash for the foreseeable future. What would make flash more attractive are users not needing the storage capacity and being happy with <20 GB (number pulled out of the air). It may be true, especially with our broadband kind of stuck at 1 to 3 MBit/s and out wired peripheral connection stuck at <500 MBit/s. It's really too bad Firewire 800 is not common, DVD is DRMed to all heck, and storage write/read speeds have been relatively stagnant, as I can see those issues preventing users from needing more storage, so flash is all that is needed. It appears that for music, <10 MB is all that is needed. The iPod nano has on doubled in storage (from 4 GB mini to 8 GB nano) over the last 4 years. That should tell us something.

Having all of your music & audio, all of your 5+ MP photos, and all of your videos (home videos, DVDs) in an iPhone, iPod or Intel's Moorestown mockup should be just as convenient and useful as iPods and music. It just seems that the content and infrastructure aren't there yet. So, I guess I argued myself out of it. Sigh...


I was just thinking ARM will be in handhelds for a long long while and Intel really doesn't have a chance until 32 nm and a good x86 SoC for handhelds can be made. UMPCs will be an interesting battleground. It just seems everyone is assuming that these tweener devices are the next big thing, a market as big as handhelds (including phones here) or PCs. It's not clear to me yet that this is the case, but there is a lot of money going into it alright.

Well that is really what we seem to be debating. I just see a need for something larger than the iPod Touch / iPhone that is still very portable. There are a number of things that drive that need. One is movies and other visual media, where a higher pixel density can make a huge difference. It is really a matter of how seriously Apple is going to take on the multimedia market.

The second issue driving demand for a larger iPhone is that it makes for a much more capable device when used as a personal computing device. In either case we aren't talking about a huge increase in size. About a half inch in width and maybe tweaking length is all that is needed to bring a lot more capability to the iPhone. Neither of these devices could really be considered competition for the laptop market. In fact a discussion of laptops in this context really doesn't make sense.

Where it would make sense is in a discussion about a tablet PC that is significantly larger than an iPhone. This again is a different market but in part it wold be a machine designed to replace laptops. It certainly isn't the platform for heavy text entry, but frankly many laptops aren't used in that manner anymore. The market is more consumerish than commercial though I could see the platform getting heavy up take in the industrial sector. As far as what it does better, well that is simple really it delivers a bigger screen than the iPhone type devices! Along with that it offers up a form factor that is much more useful than the traditional clamshell laptop approach for people on the go.


See this is where I see positive evidence that there is demand for something more powerful than the current iPhone. The N8** series is popular even though there are significant hardware trade off in the design. As the software has firmed up on the devices they have been getting more and more interest too.

Frankly I see that market, where internet and web access are wanted, as significant drivers for future hardware. The iPhone in combination with the Nokias are already proving that to be the case. But the machine has to be perceived as a general purpose computing device also. Right now the ability to access cellular networks is very important and frankly one place the Nokias come up short.

Well power is always significant in the portable market even if it is a few milliwatts difference. The issue with performance is that many of the disk drives in these media players where not optimized for computing usage but rather media streaming. For some applications Flash would produce a fairly significant boost in performance even though it would lower power usage. granted at the potable level there might not be a huge difference but it is real and any advantage that can be had power free is worth considering.

Well if Apple does do an UMPC, one of the best things they could do for themselves is to leave out any rotating media. It just makes for a more reliable machine. But then again maybe I've not had good luck with laptop harddrives so am biased.

See the thing is when I see people start talking about how much memory a UMPC or even a tablet needs and complain about the lack of space, I realize that we aren't even on the same page as to how the devices would be used. I look at these devices as platforms for people who don't want of need a full blown laptop. In the case of people needing web access and other communications features, it is a consumption model of computing. You don't buy any of these devices to write War & Peace or to program the space shuttle.

DRM sucks and frankly I haven't purchased a DVD, with a commercial movie on it, in years. I don't disagree with your numbers all that much except to say that Apple may change the equation a bit with respect to large files.

But lets face it it never hurts to have more storage. It should be very easy for Apple to put 32GBs into one of these come the start of the new year and possibly much more. For many this would be OK. I think the key here though is expansion through a compact flash slot or similar. You at least need to leave people with the impression that the thing can grow with their needs.

Actually I believe this is a very big draw for the devices. Maybe not all your media but I'd certainly want all my better pics in the unit. While I'm not into home movies at the moment I could see where that would be attractive too.

Lets put it this way it wouldn't take much to chew up whatever amount of storage Apple throws into one of these devices no matter the technology. The trick is that the storage on these devices needs to be rugged. That is why I support flash so much.

If Intel really wanted to they could produce a SOC for the larger devices today. I saw a pic of the latest form Intel and their UMPC chip is extremely small sitting next to one of their production chips. Frankly I'm not sure why they just didn't go whole hog and produce the SOC. Part of that might be customer demand where the ability to hook up alternative I/O may be appealing or the ability to spread heat around the mother boards is useful. Or maybe Intel just isn't feeling real confident about SOC right now

The only thing that is really clear to me is that the market for traditional UMPC's simply isn't there at the price they are charging. Can Apple hit a feature and price point where the units actually sell? Possibly, but I really believe the market is in the so called tweener device that is based on a tablet design. There is simply more opportunity for innovation and getting things right. Calm shell UMPC's are just an attempt to move a concept into a niche where it just doesn't work.

Dave

This entire discussion, which I've been following (very good guys!) is that it all comes back to the "Newton-like" device I'd like to see.

Either the existing UMPC technology or devicing using the new Intel chips have the potential to make a popular pocket laptop but so far they have gotton the form factor all wrong. The Forbes article said only 350K umpc's sold in 07' and the issues are mainly form factor and also price and pen input only. Tablets and all pen input only devices have never caught on. What is needed is for a good clamshell or out of the box form factor that provides a screen and keyboard as large as possible yet when folded still is jacket pocket size.

Yeah I guess that is about right. In concept anyways, hopefully the years will have been good to Newton and he will be a bit thinner and a bit more colorful.

Talkative too. Communications is a big part of the future of Mobil computing. Thus Newton will have hopefully matured a bit and have grown big boy antennas to suck up the various signals flying about him. If we are real lucky these will be well educated antennas that can grok the newer methods of RF communications like LTE or WiMax.

Dave

Your explanation isn't resonating with me. Sony also tried pretty hard with its Palm OS Clies as well. Note the iBook in background.





This was for the consumer multimedia market, and Sony couldn't make it work in Japan, let alone in the USA. The Psion and Jornada were business devices, and if there was a 2.3m unit market, I really don't understand how such a device / form factor doesn't survive. 1+ million units is a lot and Psion left money at the door, 0.5 to 1 billion USD in fact. That's just crazy for a company to abandon or for another company to not take advantage of. Or perhaps the real explanation is that this tweener device doesn't really work as a mass market device.

And I don't understand at all why it would be the perfect device for executives, marketing, and project managers, either. What do they do that'll make this a better device than the laptop and QWERTY phone combination?

One other scenario where I could see it work is with Cloud computing and automagic synchronization of the tweener clamshell with one's laptop / desktop and the Cloud. That's probably 5 years away where 32 nm devices will provide as much power as todays C2D laptops.


Umm, 1.3" thick aint thin. Apple doesn't even sell a laptop that thick anymore.

1.3 is not that thin but it would be acceptable. Ideally a form factor that is as thin as possible yet provides as large of a length and depth that still fits in a jacket pocket would be the best. For most mobile business people we do not need the most powerful laptop so the ability to carry it in a jacket pocket is much more important.

My vision of future computing is in fact something like this, where thumb-boards proliferate. RIM may be the dominate cell phone manufacturer in North America because of this (and the fact that MS has broken Blackberry exchange server compatibility yet. Handhelds will be powerful enough to run today's operating systems, so all that's needed is the handheld, a docking station with large screen, full keyboard/mouse, backup HDD, and legacy crap like opticals. The handheld is one's computer. This is where I think Apple will go too.

In this situation, a nano-laptop would have a market, but it's still a tough market as it'll be too big for the ubiquitous portability of a cell phone sized device, or the full functionality of laptop.


I'm repeating my point. I'm finding it hard to believe that Microsoft, Psion, or Palm would leave 1m units/year at ~$500 on the table. Not to mention the large services and application monies either. If the market was there and this significant, I don't think it would be a big deal for a company to capitalize on. If MS, Psion and Sony/Palm gave up you have to start to wonder about it being a human problem rather than a marketing one.

If Apple made such a device with a good built in touch type keyboard that would put a crushing blow to MS as I and many would switch to those as our primary mobile computers.

RIM licenses the compatibility. Apple could as well, if they wanted to.

Well, yes, they could if they want to. Strategically, which enemy would Apple want to deal with? My 8-ball was thinking Microsoft would be the better choice as RIM is ascending and will be competing in iPhone territory while WM phones are only incrementally improving.

I still can't believe MS hasn't created difficulties for RIM's BES...

If they have two products, which one is more strategic?

Would it be their Win Mobile software, or their Exchange server?

It's hard to tell, but Exchange is so integrated in business that I would think that MS would be afraid to not license it properly. If they did, perhaps something would, of necessity , come out to replace it.

"I'm repeating my point. I'm finding it hard to believe that Microsoft, Psion, or Palm would leave 1m units/year at ~$500 on the table. Not to mention the large services and application monies either. If the market was there and this significant, I don't think it would be a big deal for a company to capitalize on. If MS, Psion and Sony/Palm gave up you have to start to wonder about it being a human problem rather than a marketing one."

Remember Microsoft controls the operating systems which prevents most companies other than Apple to have a snowball in hells chance of competiting against them. Psion and Palm tried to compete with MS on simulataneous fronts, hardware and OS and look they both could not do it in the mainstream market.

What I think is different now is that technology has now enabled these small form factors to actually run full blown desktop OS and programs without relying on MS to build a special OS. Also with Apple in these last years being able to run MS applications they could go against MS in this same form factor especially when MS had the market all wrong with their hardware umpc visions of 7" devices. If you think about all laptop users and think what percent really need a super fast computer with the most power or a huge screen. I think that percentage is small as those types of people (designers, engineers, scientists) are more often at a fixed location with a desktop and are a smaller population in general.

I think the larger percentage of users are business people (marketing/sales, mobile managers, executives, etc.) whom would rather have a pocket computer for mobility but still one that can be a functional computer with touch type input. Since MS has failed at their umpc and now with Intels new chips, it is a perfect time for Apple to take advantage of the situation before MS finally realizes they were wrong with their hardware umpc spec.

That is the slickest mockup I've seen. Still unrealistic, but very nice.

I'd rather see it as a narrower clamshell so that it could be easily carried in a jacket pocket but I do like the keyboard, wide screen and the sleek modern look. If it could be 7.25" x 3.75" x under .75" when closed that would be so amazing.

Well mobilesalesman, HP is getting close to Jornada 2.0:

HP UMPC

I saw that prototype and was disappointed as it looks much like their old larger size windows CE HPC, the Jornada 820 which was the size of a laptop and did not sell very well compared to the more compact jacket size Jornada 720. Computer companies must have pretty poor product development managers not to realize that when HP made mobile devices other than laptops that the one that sold millions was not the large 820 but rather the 720 Jornada

I guess this is their cheap umpc laptop as I heard rumors it would sell for $199 to 599?