Mobile Device Definitions. UMPC Still Going Strong.

For someone who quit his job and risked part of the family income on the term ‘UMPC’ its not surprising that I give the occasional thought to whether the ultra mobile PC market will continue to grow! The related meme that started on Friday was an extremely interesting one to follow. It was kicked-off by Gizmodo who asked ‘Subnotebook vs. ultra mobile PC vs. Netbook: WTF Is the Difference?’ Engadget and a number of other websites followed-up.

Looking at all the posts and reviewing all the tags against analytics, trends and search results, it does appear that ‘UMPC’ is now established as a commonly used search term, especially in the last 9 months. In comparison, the terms netbook, subnotebook and mininote appear to be almost background noise and the search results are certainly not clean. MID is a common search term but again, it doesn’t return usable search results. Its future as a marketing tag is questionable although Intel do appear to be putting a lot of weight behind it and it could change quickly. I suspect it will shake out to be a commonly used term before the end of 2008. After scribbling around on paper for a few hours, this is what I ended up with as a simple definition for 2008. [More after the image…]

 
Mobile device segmentation – 2008.

Google trends for common mobile computing device definitions.

But does the name of a market niche really make any difference? Is that what customers are using as their entry point? No. Customers are searching for product names, not tags and this is possibly due to a lack of definition for the search terms. The ultra mobile PC definition is solidifying but only after 2 years of products. It seems product names are easier to understand than product brackets.

‘Eee’ is a huge search keyword appearing in 10-15 times the amount of searches compared to ultra mobile PC and it’s no wonder that ASUS want to put new products under the banner. If the trends continue, its likely that ‘eee’ would be more valuable as an brand on the Internet than ‘asus’ within 12 months. Its not only the ‘eee’ that people are searching for. Remove keyword searches that use ‘UMPC’ from the UMPCPortal analytics and its clear that over 99% of searches have product names in them. Generic labels feature in less than 0.1% of keyword searches that come to UMPCPortal and that’s despite the top 3 products in the search traffic being netbooks! Here’s the top ten search terms at the moment.

• hp 2133
• hp2133
• everex cloudbook
• htc shift
• asus r50
• gigabyte m528
• htc shift review
• asus r50a
• eeepc 900
• cloudbook review

Its interesting to try and work out how people found these product names in the first place. The Eee has had some great mainstream coverage and has channeled its way into the high-street (the weekly flyer-drop into my home letterbox included an advert for the Eee PC this week.) so one could assume that people are learning about it through mass-media and word of mouth but the only way to find out about the other devices is to visit tech websites or to simply be picking up related keywords after doing an initial search for the Eee PC! If that’s the case, its still indicative of an early adopter market.

Personally, I think we’ve got two markets out there right now in the mobile PC bracket. The first, biggest and obviously, most important is the cost-driven market that was ignited when people started reading about OLPC and Eee PC a year ago. These, generally tech-aware customers are not too worried about mobile working but do understand what a good value purchase is and are easily able to justify it. Then there’s a second, smaller market where customers are focused on getting something to fit their needs. Its a typical early-adopter style of customer that understands the technology and can map it onto their own requirements. In this 5-10" segment, mobility is the key feature, not price.

The good news is that the ultra mobile PC keyword is still alive and that, with UMPCPortal covering all devices from 4-10", we have a good chance of survival. No need for a domain change right now!