Comments on: CES 2010 Preview: 5 Trends to Watch http://blog.laptopmag.com/ces-2010-preview-5-trends-to-watch News and views on today's hottest laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices. Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:37:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Fanfoot http://blog.laptopmag.com/ces-2010-preview-5-trends-to-watch/comment-page-1#comment-25424 Fanfoot Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:14:45 +0000 http://blog.laptopmag.com/?p=25135#comment-25424 Agree completely that in several categories you list, most obviously the tablet and smartbook, the software will be key. Its unfortunate for most of the manufacturers that Google's Chrome OS won't be available until late next year, since it would likely solve the problem for many of these products. Do you really expect Asus to invest the kind of money into software needed to make a tablet viable? I don't. I think they'll do just enough to scrape by, shipping some kind of Linux with a device driver or two and maybe some wonky finger-friendly front end as well as a stylus (which you shouldn't need) when that fails you and you have to pick at tiny little icons that weren't designed for touch. Both of these could probably get by with just a browser, media playback and maybe an app store, and Chrome OS would give them that cache right away. Also the tablet is going to have to be very carefully balanced. Not too heavy (if the display is too big it will need a heavy battery), yet not too small or low rez. A responsive touch screen to make up for the size/resolution, like the iPhone does. Likely going to be lots of mis-hits in this space before somebody does it right (if). Smartbooks are going to have a hard time. There are already netbooks from respected manufacturers are very low prices ($250 say) and many netbooks already have battery life that is longer than people really need it to be. So the umbrella smartbooks are going to try to fly under is pretty low already. We'll see how these do. If the Tegra CPU isn't extremely low cost (not nVidia's forte, at least my guess), it won't go. Ditto battery life--if the display takes most of the power can the lower-power CPU really change the battery life equation that much? Especially with Pineview offering 20% increments over Atom's already great battery life? I don't know if these things have a chance... Agree completely that in several categories you list, most obviously the tablet and smartbook, the software will be key. Its unfortunate for most of the manufacturers that Google’s Chrome OS won’t be available until late next year, since it would likely solve the problem for many of these products. Do you really expect Asus to invest the kind of money into software needed to make a tablet viable? I don’t. I think they’ll do just enough to scrape by, shipping some kind of Linux with a device driver or two and maybe some wonky finger-friendly front end as well as a stylus (which you shouldn’t need) when that fails you and you have to pick at tiny little icons that weren’t designed for touch. Both of these could probably get by with just a browser, media playback and maybe an app store, and Chrome OS would give them that cache right away.

Also the tablet is going to have to be very carefully balanced. Not too heavy (if the display is too big it will need a heavy battery), yet not too small or low rez. A responsive touch screen to make up for the size/resolution, like the iPhone does. Likely going to be lots of mis-hits in this space before somebody does it right (if).

Smartbooks are going to have a hard time. There are already netbooks from respected manufacturers are very low prices ($250 say) and many netbooks already have battery life that is longer than people really need it to be. So the umbrella smartbooks are going to try to fly under is pretty low already. We’ll see how these do. If the Tegra CPU isn’t extremely low cost (not nVidia’s forte, at least my guess), it won’t go. Ditto battery life–if the display takes most of the power can the lower-power CPU really change the battery life equation that much? Especially with Pineview offering 20% increments over Atom’s already great battery life? I don’t know if these things have a chance…

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