The Hindu Business Line : Is it smart phone or shrunk PC to get online?

Bi-directional currents: 2009 will decide whether customers prefer shrunken notebook forms such as the AspireOne or phones-on-steroids such as the Asus PDA or HTC’s Android-based smart phone.

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore, Dec. 31 There are two ways to design a new product: top down or bottom up. And 2009 will decide which one paying customers prefer, when it comes to the single device they would like to use to stay ‘connected’ while on the move.

Given that the market demands a lean-mean-browsing machine, there are two approaches to delivering this; and which one, depends on the manufacturer’s genealogy: If you were a legacy personal computer maker, you would try and squeeze the traditional functions of a desktop or laptop computer into a handy portable frame.

Some early offerings have been about as successful as Cinderella’s sisters trying to wriggle their toes into the glass slipper — and customers have given them a firm thumbs down. More recent offerings of Net Books, Mini Notes, PC Alternates or Ultra Mobile PCs have got the design right — almost; some more than others.

The other approach has come from mobile hand set makers whose premise seems to be: ‘Why should PC makers get all the gravy? Let’s put our smart phones on steroids, till they look and feel like PCs’. Here again, early offerings with their miniature ‘qwerty’ keypads, challenged the user with any but the daintiest finger tips. Customers, like Queen Victoria, said (if not in so many words) ‘We are not amused’.

Creative currents

2009 is likely to see these bi-directional creative currents deliver better products — and the early waves have begun lapping Indian shores, even as the old year comes to an end. Consider: Asus, a company which has been all smiles, ever since its Eee PC, caught the public’s fancy on three continents, has hedged its bets and has just launched in the Indian market, the P565, touted as the ‘fastest business PDA ( that’s personal digital assistant) in the world”.

The touch screen device comes with a full suite of office applications and in look and feel might remind Blackberry owners of their first models. The 120-gram machine comes preloaded with SatNav’s 200-city India data base and runs on Windows Mobile version 6.1 professional. The camera is a full 3 megapixel autofocus with MPEG4. The P565 is available from this week for Rs 35,000.

Another year-end launch has been Acer’s most successful mini notebook form in 2008 — the Aspire One — which it prefers to call an Internet Device. This one model allowed the Taiwan-based company to double its total PC sales in the second half of 2008 in markets like Europe, West Asia and Africa (IDC numbers) and in India, Acer is offering one configuration this week, with a 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard disk, a VGA camera and a Linux operating system for Rs 17,499 (plus tax).

It is an astute move: Indian customers seem to prefer a PC, no matter how basic, with its own disk storage and have not been falling over themselves to buy versions that come with 4GB or 8GB flash drives. But Acer can expect to see competition from HP, Toshiba, Asus as well as aggressive Indian players like Zenith in this category.

Android system

The coming year is also likely to see the emergence of a number of smart phones running Google’s Open Source Android system — the first, from HTC, was seen in a few stands at the India Telecom Show in Delhi earlier in December.

Garmin, better known for GPS-based navigators, has said its own Android-fuelled hand phone will soon be out — and the guessing is the company and quite a few others, will use the upcoming Consumer Electronic Show (CES ’09) in Las Vegas, to launch them.

So will customers go for phones that aspire to be mobile computers or will they respond to laptop makers who say ‘Honey, I’ve shrunk the PC!’ Or will they keep both camps busy and happy? The coming months will tell.