Vice President of Corporate Marketing for VIA, Richard Brown has a personal blog over at Brown Knows (geddit?) and if you’re following VIA’s ultra mobile PC (they like to call them UMDs) progress its a good place to pick up the latest news. Richard posted his brief thoughts (in two parts)on segmentation of the ultra mobile PC market which gives us some clues, perhaps, as to how VIA might see the market. I’m reluctant to say that this is VIA’s view of course because this is Richards blog, not VIA’s. Read on…
The diagram below is the diagram he presented to the European press recently and in his blog he explains the four segments of the market shown in the diagram.
Mini-Note on the left. Richard says:
a new segment in the notebook market comprised of very small, light, and often stylish “Mini-Notes inch
Smart Phone (not PC-Phone as VIA was calling it last year.) Richard says:
This form factor is ideal as an ultra-portable pocket size notebook such as the OQO Model 02, and will be adopted more widely in the future as more telephony functions are integrated into Ultra Mobile Devices
Tablet form factor devices at the bottom. Richard says.
I’m sure that this will gain popularity in the mainstream consumer market, I feel that its primary application will be in vertical markets
CE (consumer electronics) devices at the top. Richard says: Well actually Richard hasn’t said anything yet (I hope he’s going to write a part 3 tomorrow.) Update: He’s posted Part 3 here and he talks about migration to x86 architectures.
I don’t quite agree that a unique consumer ultra mobile PC form factor exists because I think there are only three major form factors. CE is just a (largely pricing, packaging and marketing) twist on the other three. I’m not a marketing manager by a long shot but here’s my attempt at explaining my thoughts through a simple diagram. I’m an engineer you see and simplified diagrams is what my brain needs to be able to process things. I’ll show you the diagram I made of my Wife one day.
This segmentation is based on a hardware physical design perspective rather than a marketing perspective and you see that the keyboard really defines the form factor. It has to. Its the ONLY part of a ultra mobile PC that can not be changed using technology. You always need a finite sized button on a keyboard. Every other part of the design could change with technology. (Roll-screens, components, etc.) The size and type of the keyboard is driven by the screen size. If the screen is only 5″ wide, you’ll have problems putting a full-size keyboard on the device. (Samsung are trying a new approach with the SPH-P9000 though.)
Consumer devices will not have a different form factor than anything else, they too will fit into one of the existing categories and will probably use the <=5.6 screen definition, will use different electrical components and software, will have a different price point and a hugely different marketing and sales process. For CE keyboard design options you have a slide-out (e.g. OQO, Medion), Multi-Slide (Sharp EM One) and Mini Notebook (Flipstart) but they are all thumb-based keyboards for typical consumer shrt txt wrk, email, note, blog or URL input. Real keyboards aren’t possible on devices with a screen smaller than 5.6″ and if you want a full keyboard, it will push the design criteria up into the next bracket. This is a bracket where consumers see a notebook/laptop PC in front of them rather than an Ultra Mobile web-pad/PMP/navi device. Its not that a customer doesn’t want a mini notebook, its just that when they see a mini-notebook they think of an $800 serious PC purchase (non impulsive) rather than a $400 fun purchase (potentially impulsive) The whole marketing, advertising and sales effort will need to (actually, it would be stupid not to) be adjusted to take advantage of this opportunity.
One company I think got it right in the consumer design department is Arima (branded by Medion and, possibly, Gigabyte.) but due to the technology inside it, its too expensive at the moment for consumers. (I think we tend to bolt at $1000 tickets on such small items.) I also love the Sharp EM one design. Unfortunately, technology dictates (again) that if you want something as small and light as the EM One, you need to use RISC-based processing and this means problems with getting the full flash and java, Web2.0 browsing experience going. This problem will be solved over time though and I would put my money on Mr Browns company to enable it first. AMD with their LX900 is also another possibility but as so much software is asking for 3-D hardware support now (iTunes, Google Earth, Vista for example) this choice of processor might not be the best for the longer term. (Lets see what AMD do with integrating their ATI technology on the die in 2008 tho!)
Speaking of the future, I think there will be a new market for consumer ultra mobile PC devices without keyboard and that’s the grab-n-go desktop PC segment. Think of your 7″ tablet device with a 1.8ghz dual core processor, Vista and gaming-capable graphics being used as a normal desktop PC in a custom docking station. Its not really possible now but when it is (2009?) you can start selling tablet devices with docking stations as lifestyle desktop PCs replacements. This, I think, is Intel’s territory if their last few years work is anything to go by.
As for growth, well that’s up to Richard to determine. If he and other marketing managers see profits in the CE sector, then that’s where the marketing money is going and that’s where its going to grow. You didn’t think that growth was organic did you?
