The Hindu Business Line : Towards the Wee PC

Ultra mobility coupled with ’pocket’ Internet seems to be the Next Big Thing in personal computing. Anand Parthasarathy previews some recently unveiled concept designs - and the technology that is driving them.

The idea of a truly mobile platform that can do everything that a desktop PC can do has taken firm root.

Ultra mobile PC offerings from (clockwise from top left) Samsung, Sony and Asus.

The perceptible movement towards highly portable Internet devices such as the UMPC has created a whole eco-system of solutions aimed at making the mobile Net experience easier, faster, cheaper.

At its recent regional technology showcase in Singapore, Hewlett Packard unveiled technology that will enable its printers to wirelessly connect with computing devices — PCs, notebooks, UMPCs and even smart phones. It showed its new wireless-enabled Photosmart printers — the C8180, C7280, C4385 — all multifunction print-scan-copy — as well as the D7460 dedicated printer.

All four models will be available in India from November.

More interestingly, HP has also created a Wireless Upgrade Kit that allows its existing printer users to turn their machines into wireless models.

On another front, HP’s Smart Web Printing software allows users to get a desk-like browsing experience on small-sized screens and to print Web pages without having portions chopped off on the right hand margins. Even Universal Serial Bus or USB, the pervasive connection technology to attach peripherals and portable memory devices to PCs, has felt the ‘garam hava’ of wireless technology. A new Wireless USB standard has already been announced and the Taiwan-based Realtec Semiconductor Corporation used the Intel Developer Forum to showcase the world’s first single chip solution for Wireless USB — RTU7105 — which can squeeze the electronics of a router to the size of two fingers.

Hefty laptop computers? They’re only seen with corporate laggards. Nifty notebook PCs? They’re okay if you are a nomadic nerd, who wants to carry an entire office with you. Tomorrow’s ‘connected road warriors’ can spare neither the space nor the muscle power to lug kilograms of computing power on global forays. They demand a lean, mean, pocket machine that is smaller and lighter than the smallest notebook PC available today — yet larger and better featured than the so-called cross-over devices such as ‘smart’ phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).

Enter, a new personal computing product category that the industry has just recognised as the Next Big Thing to happen to the PC platform. It is called the UMPC or Ultra Mobile Personal Computer — or as so many are already dubbing it, the Wee PC.

When the computer manufacturing industry first tried its hands at creating the UMPC about a year ago, the result was a resounding flop. Microsoft, ever alert for new form factors to fuel its continued domination of the personal computer, suggested something that it called the Origami — a cheap pocket-sized mini-Tablet PC. A few tentative realisations appeared on the market only to vanish swiftly. It was an imperfect idea, ahead of its time.

Meanwhile, Broadband was born. This changed the UMPC business into what Americans call a ‘whole new ball game’. With Wireless Internet access becoming more ubiquitous and the appetites of potential customers whetted by the superior speeds of wired broadband Internet, the idea of a truly mobile platform that can do everything that a desktop PC can do — including accessing the Web — in an attractive and light form factor, has taken firm root.

The timing is right for another reason too: There was a whole mobile phone user community out there, ready and willing to use bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming video and mobile TV — but in so many geographies (including India), spectrum crunches were holding back cellular providers from going to third generation or 3G services.

The cellular industry’s crisis is being seen as an opportunity for the portable PC industry which is now saying to potential users: Forget your smart phone! We will give you a platform only slightly bigger — but a whole lot cheaper when it comes to accessing the Net. We’ll do it using the WiFi networks that are so easy to find these days. We’ll throw in small, but full keyboards so you don’t have to type long text on a numeric pad. We’ll give you a reasonably sized screen — about 7 inches across — so that you can see Web pages the way you are used to. And yes, you can also make telephone calls using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

To many lay users this might just be like something ‘The Godfather’ in Mario Puzo’s book made: An offer you can’t refuse.

Manufacturers such as Asus, Samsung and Nokia have, over the last 12 months, unveiled their own realisations of the UMPC ... some based on Microsoft’s Origami concept. They remained pricey if desirable toys for the rich and restless, lacking the ‘killer application’ that distinguishes a niche product from a mass consumer item. All that may change.

Intel road map

Ultra mobility tomorrow: Designer concepts from Elektrobit (top) and Intel, which will be fuelled by the Menlow chip platform.

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco recently, the world’s largest chip maker announced a clear road map to leverage the UMPC as the flagship computing and connectivity platform for the next era, neatly positioned between the super smart phone and the super ‘lite’ laptop. Having lost credibility in the past with portable PC chips that consumed so much power and generated so much heat that they — literally — burned users’ laps, Intel now has a fetish about low power and high performance. “The hand-held mobile experience is not very great today”, admits Intel’s Senior Vice-President in charge of the Ultra Mobility Group. So, how to make it better?

The company unveiled a new mobile computing platform called Menlow that will become available in 2008, and will cut to one-tenth the power consumed by today’s UMPCs. Processor technology called Montevina will, for the first time, offer both WiFi and WiMax wireless Internet technologies ... a shrewd move, since WiMax is gathering momentum as a long range solution for Internet access both wired and wireless. Intel has shrunk the Menlow platform (processor and chip set) to slightly larger than a playing card, with add-on options for multiple radio technologies: WiFi/WiMax; Bluetooth, Global Positioning System (GPS) for navigation — and what is clearly a shot across the bow of the cellular phone industry, a 3G phone capability. Further down the road, Intel’s map has another platform for 2009 — Moorestown — with another promised ten-fold drop in power consumed. This will shrink the fabrication technology from 65 to 45 nanometers. Moorestown will also, for the first time, combine graphic capability in the mother chip... creating a single-chip mobile computing solution.

Meanwhile, the Menlow platform has been seized by PC makers such as Asus, Benq, Elektrobit, Quanta and others, to create concept UMPC machines. By offering multiple connection routes to the Internet and throwing in satellite-based navigation, they hope to create a new computing category that will appeal to a wider section of the market.

In another interesting development, the Intel chip Menlow set has been used to fuel a UMPC that runs on a Linux flavour, Ubuntu, rather than on the mobile version of Windows Vista.

Intel’s foray into the UMPC sector is a case of a PC player nibbling the edges of what has been a mobile phone market.

The reverse is also a possibility and its own annual developer event in early October is likely to be used by the leader in mobile phone cores — ARM — to stake its claim to be considered as a serious contender in the ultra mobile PC space.

Indeed the UMPC may morph fairly soon into what is loosely being called Mobile Internet Device or MID... a portable communication tool with good Internet features and a PC look and feel (at least in miniature).

Right now all that customers can do as they wait and watch, is to say, “Let the ultra mobile games begin — and the more, the merrier!”

They also serve - wirelessly

A miniature wireless USB router fuelled by Realtec's simple chip solution, unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum.ANAND PARTHASARATHY

The perceptible movement towards highly portable Internet devices such as the UMPC has created a whole eco-system of solutions aimed at making the mobile Net experience easier, faster, cheaper.At its recent regional technology showcase in Singapore, Hewlett Packard unveiled technology that will enable its printers to wirelessly connect with computing devices - PCs, notebooks, UMPCs and even smart phones.

It showed its new wireless-enabled Photosmart printers - the C8180, C7280, C4385 - all multifunction print-scan-copy - as well as the D7460 dedicated printer. All four models will be available in India from November.

More interestingly, HP has also created a Wireless Upgrade Kit that allows its existing printer users to turn their machinesinto wireless models.

On another front, HP's Smart Web Printing software allows users to get a desk-like browsing experience on small-sized screens and to print Web pages without having portions chopped off on the right hand margins. Even Universal Serial Bus or

USB, the pervasive connection technology to attach peripherals and portable memory devices to PCs, has felt the `garam hava' of wireless technology. A new Wireless USB standard has already been announced and the Taiwan-based Realtec Semiconductor Corporation used the Intel Developer Forum to showcase the world's first single chip solution for Wireless USB - RTU7105 - which can squeeze the electronics of a router to the size of two fingers.

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