The Hindu : Front Page : Soon, notebook PCs with built-in mobile phones

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Sunday, Nov 18, 2007
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Soon, notebook PCs with built-in mobile phones

Special Correspondent

Phone-enhanced smarter PCs are in demand, says global study

Bangalore: The mobile phone industry has been busy for some time now, trying to enhance handset usage by providing more and more features that are commonly available on desktop and laptop personal computers — such as office tools and the Internet. They call these devices ‘smart phone.’

Now a research report says the really smart thing they should have been doing is something else: A global study by Pyramid Research has found that an overwhelming number of some 12,000 users surveyed worldwide would like to see mobile broadband telephones built into their notebook PCs. In other words, they want not smart phones but smarter PCs.

The study was commissioned by Microsoft and the GSM Association, the body which represents all the telecom players who cater to the predominant cellular mobile telephone technology. The finding was the only genuine surprise thrown up during the Asia Mobile Congress held last week in Macau.

As much as 88 per cent of the users quizzed across 13 countries said they would like this feature in the so-called budget notebooks and 60 per cent said they would like a bundled mobile phone contract when they bought their notebook PC.

GSM Association Chief Executive Rob Conway calls this a huge untapped opportunity — with 70 million PC buyers waiting out there to pay a little extra so that their notebooks doubled as high-speed broadband mobile phone connections. The Association challenged the industry to come up with compellingly priced phone-enhanced portable PCs before the next Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in February 2008.

Manufacturers such as LG and Samsung already offer — mostly in Korea — such notebooks enhanced with the broadband mobile phone technology called HSPA, High Speed Packet Access. But these are not priced for the ‘aam janatha.’ Also available are HSPA plug-in modules from makers such as Novatel and Option, that can mobile-broadband-enable today’s generation of notebook PCs. They all kick up the phone-based data rate to nearly 4 megabits per second. Notebooks, by default, come with WiFi capability. But clearly many users don’t like the hassle of trying to locate the nearest wireless Internet hotspot. They want the Internet to be as easy as dialling a mobile phone. And yes, they want to make voice calls from their notebooks too — any time, any place.

The 40-page Pyramid-GSM-Microsoft Report in PDF format can be downloaded at http://www.gsmwo

rld.com/documents/mmb/mass_market_notebook_report.pdf

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