Netbook + mobile = not yet
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, operating systems, Processors, Windows Mobile, Laptop, Hardware, Mobile on
Wouldn’t you want a netbook that turned on as fast as a phone, but could still run all your Windows programs? Of course it wouldn’t do both at once, but I was half-hoping that one of the HTC announcements at Mobile World Congress last week would be an update of the Advantage or the Shift: a netbook that could dual-boot into Windows. It’s not just impatience; using 3G on a netbook eats into the already low battery life (at a good five hours using Wi-Fi, the battery life of the 6-cell HP Mini 2140 is exceptional). If I could do the Web browsing on the lower-power, better optimised mobile OS, I’d have more battery life left for my meeting later.
I-mate’s Legionnaire/Warrior combo comes close - a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone that slides into a netbook case that’s just the screen and keyboard and battery; the phone drives the screen through its XGA connector and uses the external keyboard. Oh, and works as a huge touchpad as well. The prototype we saw needs some work - CEO Jim Morrison promises the keyboard will be bigger and better - but slap Internet Explorer Mobile 6 or Skyfire (or the Fennec project mobile version of Firefox) on there and you can use Outlook Web Access and Google Docs or remote desktop into your PC. If a call comes in while the phone is driving the screen and keyboard, it automatically switches to speakerphone. And the fully-loaded Warrior ‘jacket’ includes four batteries that give you over 50 hours of use (and your phone comes out charged at the end).
But I do want the power of a local PC as well; I want to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to make panoramas and upload them to Flickr, I want to run OneNote (because without it I’d be a day early or three hours late for a lot more meetings), I want the Semagic client for my personal blog over at LiveJournal, and the ClipMate software that means I never copy something, forget to paste it and have to go look for it again. And OWA is great, but SpeedFiler doesn’t work in it and if I don’t file messages as I reply to them my inbox is a mess (OK, more of a mess than usual). (Oh, and I want to be able to use a 3G dongle, and printers and scanners and all the other peripherals; drivers are the curse of any OS.) My list isn’t going to be your list, but to my mind, the much higher returns for Linux netbooks mean that people want their PC apps as much as they mean that Linux isn’t ready as a mass market user interface.
Pre-boot environments are another option. The consumer version of the excellent Lenovo S10 has a Quick Start Linux environment (it’s the same Splashtop system that Asus has developed as ExpressGate); you can browse and IM and use Skype. But when you’re done, it takes as long to boot as ever. Phonenix’s HyperSpace is a lot more powerful: the Hybrid version carries on booting Windows in the background so you can have a little fun and then get straight to work. But the Hybrid version needs VT, which means a powerful notebook to start with (with Atom you get the Hyperspace Dual, which gives you much the same features but you have to boot Windows from scratch afterwards).
And while these pre-boot environments all cope with Wi-Fi, only HyperSpace supports a 3G dongle and so far only the Option model that AT&T sells in the US (did I say drivers are the curse of any OS?). A netbook that could dual boot into, say Windows Mobile, would come with built-in connectivity. But when I pounced on Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, between the launch of the Touch Diamond2 and Pro2 (which will be my next phone) and the launch of the Vodafone Magic (I think the magic was persuading Google it didn’t have to look like the Sidekick) he said that the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet - and probably neither is the market. But if netbooks continue to dominate, dropping the price a few pounds and painting them different colours isn’t going to be enough to make a new netbook standout. Putting a phone in there, on the other hand… maybe next year?
-Mary
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