Intel-designed untra-skinny laptops are set to flood the market this Christmas and next. Softtalkmobile considers the implications...
Next year Intel is set to unleash what it’s calling its single biggest marketing campaign of 2012. This is going to be a tsunami of dollars designed to underpin and propel the launch of Ultrabooks into the mainstream.
If you don’t know what an Ultrabook is you might reasonably ask, “and so?”. I’ll try not to lapse into gushing marketing speak but objectively speaking they’re slick, ultra-thin devices that pack a powerful punch.
Think of a funky laptop and imagine it a lot thinner and lighter and you’ll get the idea.
But on the inside there’s also a huge difference. There’s no waiting for boot-up, just prod that little start button and it’s on – immediately. Graphic quality is well into the hi-definition zone and performance is so blisteringly fast that data intensive download times, such as for video, are slashed to mere seconds.
A few months back, at the Computex trade show, an Intel insider came out and said that Ultrabooks will account for 40 per cent of the consumer laptop market in 2012. That’s a bold prediction, even for a company that turns over nearly $15 billion a year. Clearly Intel has a lot of confidence in Ultrabooks.
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It can afford to take this position because Ultrabooks signal an evolutionary step change in the PC. Without getting bogged down in technical details the processors that power these devices have ultra-low voltage, embedded graphics and flash-based solid-state drives.
These features, which your average person is not going to be that bothered about, ensure the Ultrabook will give the average person what they are bothered about: fast, light and instant-on computing – they power up from sleep mode in two seconds.
Of course there’s the opposing view that the mobile market is already swamped with smart phones and tablets and little devices that pack quite a punch on their own so why would anyone want a slimmed down laptop or scaled up netbook?
However, at Softalkmobile we’re betting that market forces are going to make a success of Ultrabooks. Manufacturers are clambering on board: ASUS, Samsung, LG, Lenovo and Toshiba have already produced devices, and whispers have it that Dell and HP are set to join in the fray.
At a wider level this move towards faster and lighter is indicative of the market trends in mobile computing where more power is compressed into ever smaller spaces, until we’ve reached a point where we almost have supercomputing ability in our pockets.
In this sense, it may already feel like we’re in the middle of a maturing market but there’s still a long way to go. For example, speech recognition has long been the holy grail of computing. Many companies have risen and disappeared like air bubbles on the surface of water in their desire to replicate HAL, the mellifluous computer in Kubrick's sci-fi movie A Space Odyssey.
Apple’s Siri is a step in this direction though an infallible ability to recognise nuanced speech and regional accents is still some way off.
At some point these apparently separate threads of mobile computing are going to meet, meld and fuse, and provide computing that is all around us in everyday objects that we can interact with via speech, touch or even facial recognition. This is almost inevitable.
Closer to home, Ultrabooks will be prized for their lightness, power and refinement and they’ll be around for some time with ever more sophisticated versions introduced.
But ten years from now and they’ll probably be seen with the same amusement that today we view the Osborne 1, the world’s first ‘mobile’ computer; it was the size of a suitcase, hefty to lug around and had a screen that was barely bigger than a beer mat.
We’ve come a long way since then and there’s still a long way to go in the world of mobile computing. Ultrabooks are a significant signpost on this journey.
* This blog post is written by Softtalkmobile, and is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program, a single channel for distributing apps to multiple devices, multiple operating systems, and multiple app stores.
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