Macopinion

PhoneBook Anyone?

Last week it was reported that PDA sales are in the toilet, so to speak, presumably being squeezed by a market pincer movement of booming a notebook computer sales and the skyrocketing popularity of smartphones like the iPhone and Research In Motion's Blackberry.

According to Ars Technica's Nate Anderson, citing IDC statistics, between the second quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of 2007, PDAs sales decreased by an astonishing 43.5 percent worldwide. Anderson reports that Dell is spinning down its Axim line of PDAs, and Fujitsu-Siemens has announced that it is exiting the PDA business.

Maybe Steve Jobs was right about the Apple Newton after all, although it would seem that he bailed out of the PDA sector too early, missing its strongest sales years.

Anyway, it seems that he's like hitting the nail on they head squarely with the iPhone and continued emphasis on Mac notebooks, although there is still a yawning void in Apple's portable computer lineup that was created by the discontinuance of the 12-inch PowerBook last year.

Another Ars Technica report, this time by Ken Fisher, notes that "the real story in PC sales is the ascendancy of the notebook computer. From 2004 to 2005, desktop PC sales only grew 7.7 percent then stayed flat the next year with less than a percentage point of growth. During that same period, notebook sales grew 35.8 percent and 28.4 percent. In 2007, notebooks are expected to outpace desktops in terms of percentage growth by a factor of almost 5."

Personally, while I've always appreciated that the PDA concept, especially the Newton, had some attractive qualities, it always seemed to me that a used PowerBook offered a lot more bang for the same buck, although not of course the same level of convenient compactness. For example, I've began to see 867 MHz and 1 GHz 12-inch PowerBooks offered for about five hundred dollars.

Apple's short-lived eMate 300, a Newton-based hybrid device that combined PDA engineering and features with a laptop computer form factor attempted to bridge the gap, but was handicapped by the limitations of the Newton operating system, and was only on the market for a year or so before Jobs pulled the plug on the entire Newton platform.

The eMate 300 was packaged in a rugged translucent aquamarine and black clamshell case with a 480x320 16-shade grayscale backlit LCD touchscreen display that could be used either Newton PDA style with a stylus or laptop-style with a built-in conventional keyboard, and came bundled with a suite of built-in software applications including a word processor, draw program, spreadsheet, graphing calculator, address book, calendar functions. It could also run hundreds of applications that had been developed for Newton 2.0. The eMate 300 also had TCP/IP capabilities for Internet and email access. Measuring 12.0" x 11.4" x 2.1" and weighing in at four pounds, the eMate was heavier than the new subnotebook Apple is believed to be working on is anticipated to be if and when it materializes. The eMate was lighter, but not smaller than either the contemporaneous subnotebook PowerBook Duos and PowerBook 2400s, or the 12" PowerBooks and iBooks that followed. It was, however, a lot cheaper than any PowerBook available at the time, selling for US$800.00, although that price would put it in the high end of the low end (PC) notebooks today.

It is tantalizing to speculate what the eMate would have been like had it been able to run a stripped-down version of Mac OS X on a color display like the iPhone does. Indeed, the iPhone's technology could very conceivably serve has the basis for a convergence machine combining capabilities and the respective best features of laptop computers and the iPhone. PhoneBook anyone?

I have no idea whether Apple has something like this in mind or not, but the new iMac's styling indicates that Apple isn't averse to incorporating iPhone themes into its computer products. I'm pretty confident that there will be a subcompact Apple notebook by the next Macworld Expo, or possibly even in time for the pre-Christmas buying season. A product that could do everything, or at least most of what the iPhone can do, but with a real keyboard, a computer-size display, and more storage capacity should have a ton of appeal I think. The risk of course would be the cannibalizing iPhone sales, but I think sooner or later the world is going to move toward even greater device convergence, and why shouldn't Apple be in the vanguard?

Of course, a counter argument is that you if you already have a laptop, then the actual phone communications function can be handled by an inexpensive (or even free) cellphone, and a computer with WiFi will give you a a lot more satisfying Web experience than you can have on the iPhone's diminutive screen - cool as it is for a cellphone.

Whether it turns out to be a "PhoneBook" or a MacBook Pro mini or nano, I'm guessing that we will see a new, subcompact notebook (hopefully running cool enough that we can call it a laptop again) by MacWorld Expo '08 in January, and it wouldn't surprise me if they got one out the door in time for the pre-Chriistmas sales season.

Last week MacNN and others reported that Apple has patented a retractable notebook port system with I/O ports that close to conserve space but flip down to provide access when needed, thus conserving space by recessing the various port connections into the body of the laptop. "Mobile devices such as notebook computers are becoming increasingly thinner," Apple observes in its patent filing of April 17, 2007 but first published last Thursday. "As a result, connections systems need to be reduced in size to accommodate smaller form factors... For example, a notebook computer may have a highly tapered chassis shape." Sounds very interesting. The connection system sounds like it might be at least conceptually reminiscent of the old PowerBook Duo Mini Dock.

The rumor mills are also predicting that the new baby notebook will have NAND flash RAM data storage a la the iPod nano and iPhone rather than a conventional hard drive, and be equipped with a 13" widescreen display, probably with LED backlighting, as was recently introduced on the 15" MacBook Pro. So maybe no touchscreen this time, bit it will be interesting to see how many iPhone features cross over to the new 'Book.


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cmoore@macopinion.com


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