Thursday, June 3, 2010
The 30th annual Computex show in Taipei City, Taiwan, this week began with the high degree of hospitality typical to this friendly island. The lovely, young girls greeting guests at the Nangang Exhibit Hall were joined by the show's official mascot.
The crowd of attendees appeared quite upbeat and eager to see the new technology that is always promised and often delivered by exhibitors in this venue.
Full screen, tablet-like devices could be found in almost every section of the Nangang Exhibit Hall, but many were encased in glass enclosures, tempting and sleek looking, but inaccessible, leaving lots of questions about usability, weight, tactile experience, and utility.
For platforms available to the general public, these "new" solutions are mostly direct derivatives of the PC ecosystem that dominates Computex and the Taiwan design experience: Windows or Linux operating systems, Intel ATOM CPUs, integrated cameras, lots of I/O ports, and proposed battery life in the same range as existing notebook and netbook solutions.
Some examples continued to remind the exhibit visitors that even in a new, sexy form factor, remnants of the "PC experience" will continue to haunt early adopters, thanks to limitations in the maturity of these systems.
In a world where the bar has now been raised by the introduction of function-dedicated consumer products, another very interesting factor has crept into the measurement criteria.
Consumers have now been exposed to solutions that perform limited functions and therefore the specifications for these new tools actually reference value to the user in a defined context.
For example, when purchasing an MP3 player, the consumer expects the figure that references storage capacity to mean space usable by them for storing songs. In an eReader, available storage space refers to how many books or documents they can store for future consumption.
The general purpose nature of the PC architecture means that typical numbers for similar specifications for capacity has a totally ambiguous meaning when referring to any specific activity.
When you purchase a notebook with a 256Gbyte hard drive, that number does not reference the space that is available for you. Instead, that number references the total amount of space that you will share with the operating system, required system utilities, your purchased applications, and a thousand drivers for printers that you will never install.
The figure provided describing the amount of main memory could be multiple gigabytes, but the amount of that memory that will be occupied by your data and applications versus the operating system and required utilities is unstated.
Clearly, Computex 2010 has to be considered Day 1 in the deployment of PC technology into the realm of application-specific, consumer-focused solutions. Day 1 products are not ready for prime time, but the talent and energy of the teams around the world who develop silicon, displays, power supplies, and especially software for this ecosystem will certainly respond to the market opportunity that has been defined by their competition.
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