ON iPODS MORPHING INTO "WALKABOUT" MINIATURE PCs

TAKE IT ALL TO GO

(UPDATE:  jkontherun has some additional details on the Dualcor cPc here)

AppleInsider has a post on a Morgan Stanley report with the headline "Consumers seek more iPods than cell phones this holiday" (via memeorandum).  Further quoting from the report:

"We continue to believe demand outstrips supply for iPods and that Apple is doing the best it can to supply both its own and traditional retail stores," analyst Rebecca Runkle wrote in a research note released to clients on Friday. The analyst recently conducted a survey of 2,500 US consumers and found that they plan to buy more iPod and related products than any other electronics category.

"To hone in on this point, more people plan to buy an iPod this holiday season than a cell phone," the analyst said. "Also interesting, more people plan to buy iTunes gift cards this season than non-iPod branded MP3 players."

Although the report is about how strong and great the tail winds seem to be for Apple going into the holidays in 2005, it made me think about what similar headlines may be saying three years from now.

At the core, the iPod story is about a brilliantly conceived, designed, branded and executed story about an application specific device with a miniature hard drive.  And that it, along with all other Apple products, come with "Steve Jobs" inside (contrary to BusinessWeek worrying about whether Apple needs to advertise "Intel Inside" next year).

But the world is changing.  General purpose computers are shrinking down to the size of a cell phone, given the constant evolution of powerful, power-sipping processors, bigger and cheaper memory that can retain data even with the power off, brighter and again power-conserving miniature screens, computers on USB drives, and tinier hard drives that can do more at an ever decreasing price.

What punctuated this yesterday for me was this CNET story titled "Startup merges cell phone and PC into a handheld".  Some excerpts:

"DualCor Technologies next month will unveil the cPC, a full-fledged handheld Windows XP computer that also comes with a built-in smart phone that runs Windows Mobile 5.0.

  The cPC is 6.5 inches long, 3.3 inches wide, 1.2 inches thick and has a 5-inch diagonal screen...

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Through some engineering and design advances, the cPC's battery lasts long enough to let users run applications simultaneously for eight hours or more...

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The cell phone aspect of the device has Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC phone edition, a PXA communications processor from Intel, 128MB of DRAM and 1GB of flash memory.

Together, the computer and cell phone components share a 40GB hard drive...

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However, the device can run for eight to 12 hours in "smart phone" mode. Because of the memory footprint and other technology, users can access and receive e-mail in smart-phone mode and run applications such as PowerPoint in a limited fashion. As a result, the PC components and OS are asleep most of the time...

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The cPC also comes with a few additional features that add shine to its sparkle factor. The screen is made from special glass, manufactured by LG, which provides a brightness level of 200 NITS, which the company claims is brighter than most other smart phone screens.

The company figured how to include TabletPC functionality without incorporating a digitizer, which is an additional chip.

Users can also dock the cPC like a CPU, plugging it into an outlet and LCD screen and it will feel no different than using a regular desktop."

In some ways, this is a non-Apple implementation of something I described back in August that Apple could do with the Intel-based hardware it was moving to next year:

"The company could offer a "Mac iPod", loaded with the latest Intel based Mac operating system, which the customer DOES pay for.

But this iPod has a special USB adapter, AND an on-board processor/CPU, much like I've discussed in my "computer-on-a-stick" posts before here and here.

The user can plug this into any existing Windows PC, whether it has Microsoft Windows XP or the new Windows Vista software, and in effect have a dual-boot computer that turns into a Mac.  Of course, Apple would bundle all its cutting edge application software that it already delivers with every Mac."

The DualCor guys are of course taking it a step further and adding cell phone functionality with Microsoft's Smartphone OS in the device.

So the reality is that over the next year, both the Windows world and Apple will be technically able to deliver full-fledged computers, with or without cell phone functionality, with MULTIPLE operating systems, in packages the size of today's iPod.

MP3 music playing then becomes JUST another application on that device in that case, along with:

• internet telephony,
• the ability to watch "microchunked" video programming,
• digital and video camera capability,
• a choice of accessing multiple wireless networks on the fly, ALONG with Wifi, Wimax and Bluetooth,
• AND a full-fledged PC that you can casually carry around WITHOUT a laptop bag. 

And it'd be a lot more OPEN than any cell phone carrier's network today.

So could the headline in three years or so read:  "Consumers seek more mini-PCs than cell phones this holiday?"

Comments

[Emil Sotirov]

Here is my take on this theme... Have Syke and Bod - Will Compute. The Near Future of Personal Computing.