Quote:
Originally Posted by Logseman
Have you seen the Motorola Atrix 4G? It can get docked to a laptop (a certain one made by Motorola of course) and then you can have the phone and the laptop together.
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That's the sort of thing I'm thinking of, but I don't want the other device to be a laptop.
Folks here might remember the UMPCs Microsoft and Intel were pushing a few years back. MS and Intel had a simple reason: growth. MS wanted to expand the market for Windows, which was largely saturated. Intel was losing market share to AMD. What to do? A whole new class of device, that would run Windows and use Intel chips.
But they never took off because there wasn't a compelling use case. Users likely already had a laptop, and possibly a desktop as well. Why would they buy a UMPC? What would they do with it that they didn't already do with what they had?
The UMPCs were carefully speced to make them less of a threat to laptops, and the existing laptop makes like Dell and Fujitsu
didn't make them: they were offered by vendors like Via and Samsung not thought of as PC makers. They were also pricy.
I'd buy such a thing to
replace a laptop with a smaller, lighter, and less expensive device, and certainly wouldn't carry both when traveling.
The ASUS eee created the netbook market by making a device that could replace a laptop, yet was smaller, lighter, and significantly cheaper, and a raft of entrants followed, largely absorbing the market the UMPC targeted.
Apple created the tablet market with the iPad, which a friend aptly called a "media consumption device", which was small and light, but worked well for things that required minimal input from the user to perform.
The popularity of the iPad, and the availability of the Google Android OS created the market for the raft of Android based tablets hitting the market. Android has name recognition, and the fact that a device uses it is a selling point. Android powered tablets running ARM processors have good battery life (low power is an ARM design goal) and steadily increasing functionality. I was wondering back when Android hit the street when we'd see devices based on it that
weren't smartphones, and it didn't take long to happen.
An Android based tablet with a decent sized screen and a folding BT keyboard can do about 80% of what I'd use a laptop to do. Add a cell phone that could tether to it and serve as a modem for places where wifi wasn't available, and you start to get a compelling combination. Keep the weight low enough, hit the right price point, and you have something sweet indeed.
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Dennis