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    Home Latest News
    • PC Hardware

    The UPCs Swiss Army Knife Approach Doesnt Compute

    By
    Jim Louderback
    -
    April 12, 2004
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      I see Robs fallen for the latest pretty girl to walk down the street.

      In his column about the UPC, a new class of tiny yet powerful Windows-based portable computers, he waxes enthusiastic. According to Rob, these tiny and cramped devices are poised to steal market share, and ultimate market leadership, away from notebooks and PDAs.

      I disagree. To start with, these UPCs are still halfway between usability and portability. Yes, they are small enough that you can carry them in a purse or briefcase more easily than todays wonderbrick notebooks from Dell and IBM. But they still dont deliver the ultimate of portability, where you stick it in your pocket and forget about it.

      Rob thinks a high-resolution, 5-inch screen is good enough for reading long e-mails and documents. But on airplanes and trains, where many of these will be used, overhead lights and windows can turn a pretty screen into a faded dowager pretty quickly.

      And Rob must have perfect vision, which is great for him. For the rest of us with glasses, contact lenses and astigmatisms, were looking for bigger, crisper screens, not smaller ones.

      Rob also envisions a world where the UPC will replace both the handheld/PDA and the notebook. He points to stalled PDA sales as a reason why those devices are not living up to their promises.

      But even if you adopt a UPC, you still arent getting rid of every other portable computing device. Look at that thing hanging out of your ear. Its connected to a computing device thats almost as powerful as a PDA, and is starting to replicate PDA-style organization functions. Its called a phone. And smart phones, or even the merely capable phones, are why PDA sales have stalled.

      When it comes to unconscious portability, the phone wins out every time. My phone (much to my chagrin at times) is with me 100 percent of the time. The UPC is still too big to fit in my pocket, and still too expensive and fragile for me to tote around everywhere.

      Next page: The whole concept is wrong.

      Page Two

      In addition, the form factor is all wrong. The keyboards are too small for touch typing, and too large for BlackBerry-style touch typing. The devices lack DVD drives, so you cant watch movies on them (unless you illegally break CSS). The screens, as I mentioned before, are too small for many visually challenged users. But the worst sin of all, especially for an ultraportable device, is the anemic battery life. Paul Allens FlipStart is expected to last only two hours, while the OQO expects just double that. A device that you expect to take with you everywhere ought to last at least through a single day without dying.

      Finally, the whole concept of cramming everything into a single device is just wrong. Instead of comparing computers to cars—and a UPC to an SUV—its more appropriate to compare them to flatware. Computers have mutated from a single, expensive Swiss Army knife to smaller, less expensive forks, knives and spoons. I dont want one $1,200 device that does everything. Instead, give me a portable DVD/media player for music and movies, a smart phone with my calendar and address book, and an ultraslim tablet-sized notebook, like the Sharp MM20, with a big screen and full keyboard, but half as thick as a deck of cards. And give me a big, brawny desktop at home for games, data storage and the like.

      /zimages/1/28571.gifRead PC Magazines review of the Sharp Actius MM20 here.

      And finally, that brings me to cost. These all-in-one devices are full of limitations: no card slots, no DVD drives, no full-sized keyboards. Yet theyre just as expensive as a full-sized notebook. Here in the United States, we expect to get more for more. Only with phones—at least so far—does smaller translate into more expensive, and even thats changing. At $1,200 or so, UPCs are just too expensive and too limited in the long run.

      Id rather have me an array of compatible devices instead of a single UPC. These new computers may do just about everything, but they dont do anything very well. And that translates into failure in my book.

      /zimages/1/28571.gifCheck out eWEEKs Desktop & Notebook Center at http://desktop.eweek.com for the latest news in desktop and notebook computing.

      Jim Louderback
      With more than 20 years experience in consulting, technology, computers and media, Jim Louderback has pioneered many significant new innovations.While building computer systems for Fortune 100 companies in the '80s, Jim developed innovative client-server computing models, implementing some of the first successful LAN-based client-server systems. He also created a highly successful iterative development methodology uniquely suited to this new systems architecture.As Lab Director at PC Week, Jim developed and refined the product review as an essential news story. He expanded the lab to California, and created significant competitive advantage for the leading IT weekly.When he became editor-in-chief of Windows Sources in 1995, he inherited a magazine teetering on the brink of failure. In six short months, he turned the publication into a money-maker, by refocusing it entirely on the new Windows 95. Newsstand sales tripled, and his magazine won industry awards for excellence of design and content.In 1997, Jim launched TechTV's content, creating and nurturing a highly successful mix of help, product information, news and entertainment. He appeared in numerous segments on the network, and hosted the enormously popular Fresh Gear show for three years.In 1999, he developed the 'Best of CES' awards program in partnership with CEA, the parent company of the CES trade show. This innovative program, where new products were judged directly on the trade show floor, was a resounding success, and continues today.In 2000, Jim began developing, a daily, live, 8 hour TechTV news program called TechLive. Called 'the CNBC of Technology,' TechLive delivered a daily day-long dose of market news, product information, technology reporting and CEO interviews. After its highly successful launch in April of 2001, Jim managed the entire organization, along with setting editorial direction for the balance of TechTV.In the summer or 2002, Jim joined Ziff Davis Media to be Editor-In-Chief and Vice President of Media Properties, including ExtremeTech.com, Microsoft Watch, and the websites for PC Magazine, eWeek and ZDM's gaming publications.
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