It's hard to not picture Steve Jobs, the increasingly frail-looking CEO of Apple, as the Master Yoda to all geek padawans at whatever public stage he takes.
And so, when he declared in the first week of June at the D8 Conference of Wall Street Journal 's popular technology publication All Things Digital that the PCs are dying, one has to sit up and take note. “I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Fewer people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
Apple has been riding high in recent months. It has just pipped Microsoft as the most valuable tech company in the world when it crossed the net worth of US $220 billion — its tablet PC, the iPad, crossing the 2 million sales mark. So irrespective of whether it was publicity hyperbole or not, it is hard to ignore the emergence of the PC Tablet as one of the biggest changes not just of this year but possibly the coming decade.
And the signs are there for everyone to see. Nearly every technology vendor is out to put his finger in the pie. At the Computex fair in Taipei, Asia's biggest electronics fair, tablet PCs were again the buzzword. Taiwan-based AsusTek unveiled its Eee Pad — the moniker taken from their popular Eee Pc range of netbooks. Acer has also unveiled its plans for a tablet that would run on the Windows 7 Operating System (OS). Other prominent players getting into the fray are HP with its Slate, Acer, Dell and Lenovo.
Apart from the recognised players, there are the fringe players: German company Neofonie's We Pad targeting the European markets; Chinese manufacturer Cynovo's C7 tablet targeting the huge China market; and our own Hyderabad-based Notion Ink's ‘Adam Tablet PC' that won rave reviews from the gadget sites after its preview at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona in February, this year.
As many as 30 manufacturers are in the fray with their tablet PC offerings, all of which should hit the shelves by the end of the year.
Future-ready device
There are several pointers as to why tablet PCs are the toast of the town these days, but in the end it boils down to three major advances.
First the hardware advances, especially in shrinking the CPU (central processing unit) and fusing the GPU (graphic processing unit) using the latest nano-technology, help design these devices. The intel Atom Z520 processor unit made using 45 mm nano-technology is roughly the size of a standard coin, yet delivers computing speeds in excess of 1 Giga Hertz. Even better, these chips consume less electricity and hence can serve the purpose of a handheld mobile device that won't require constant charging.
Second, the display of some of these devices has come a long way not just in terms of power consumption but also in terms of clarity. Some of the displays, such as that of the American manufacturer Pixel Qi, promise a mix of both reflective and back-lit displays that would make the handheld devices truly mobile. Pixel Qi's displays were primarily developed for the ambitious international project ‘OLPC' (one laptop per child) that is now aiming at developing a tablet PC for under US $75. So that gives a perspective of just how cost-effective the display must be.
Third, and most important, the way we compute has undergone a drastic change in the past few years. ‘Cloud computing' has gained large-scale acceptance and it is a common practice for both individual users and corporate users to allow their data to reside in remote servers. What it essentially does is enable the doing away of huge storage devices. Also the coming of entirely web-based OS means tablet PCs could well be the first of many incredibly mobile devices.
The Indian angle
Notion Ink's Adam Tablet, which several top geek sites have gone on to describe with the near blasphemous “better-than-iPad” descriptions, could well be the must-buy gadget later this year.
In his official blog, Notion Ink's young CEO, the IIT-graduate Rohan Shravan, in a post, dated June 9, while dismissing talk that the Adam is getting delayed, has said the company would focus on very “aggressive pricing”. The company has now promised to take the tablet to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in the second week of November. They have hinted that the pricing would be in the range of US $399 to US $498.
Exciting times ahead, padawans ... Really exciting.
