8 New Notebooks For Road Warriors

"At the high end, they're all different," says Neil Popli, president and CEO of San Francisco-based solution provider Microgear. "I sell to a lot of engineers and technical guys, and they want a lot of processing power and a great big screen. Someone who's on the road more is probably more worried about weight. Of course, everyone wants both, but no one can seem to manage that." Popli also notes that road warriors often make their own decisions about hardware, which keeps him flexible about the vendors he uses; he says he's even seeing healthy sales in Apple notebooks.

Most of the growth in the commercial notebook market, however, is a by-product of the convergence of desktop and notebook price and performance. Desktop PCs aren't going to disappear any time soon; there are too many advantages to inexpensive, easily serviceable, specifically nonmobile hardware. As businesses look to refresh their existing hardware, however, they're finding the price differences between comparable notebooks and desktops marginal relative to potential productivity gains from giving normally on-site workers some remote capacity.

"Clearly, the migration is under way," according to Chris Ferry of the Technology Integration Group, a San Diego-based solution provider. "The mobility factor is something that most people are trying to get to. You're always going to have heavy Citrix users who don't want a lot at the client end, and you're going to have people who really want the few hundred dollars' price difference, but there's definitely a move in that direction," Ferry says.

Sumit Agnihotry, Acer's director of mobile product marketing, agrees. "The transition from desktop to laptop is happening faster in the consumer space--commercial is more cautious--but it's igniting here too. It's not going to be long before mobility becomes the driver behind these hardware refreshes."

Price is often the primary factor in selecting specific desktop-replacement hardware; businesses frequently buy the hardware in relatively large orders, and while they may be interested in durability, they don't expect the user to have significant performance demands. Even vendors like HP and Panasonic, which have traditionally focused on higher-end hardware, are starting to extend their product lines to lower price points in order to catch this shift. "Those guys are swapping out a bunch of $500 machines, and per-unit cost makes a big difference," Microgear's Popli says. "They're not interested in bells and whistles."

The smallest, but perhaps fastest-growing, group is the "true mobile" users: people who need computing power and connectivity out in the field. These users generally fall into specific vertical markets--real estate, insurance, transportation, emergency medicine--that until recently were relatively untouched by notebook sales. Improvements in wireless networking and "ruggedized" hardware have only now made it practical to keep these users tied into their employers' networks while they're out in the field.

Field users typically place heavy demands on their hardware and often require unusual configurations and heavily customized solutions. Though there can be major differences between, say, a real estate agent and a construction foreman, they almost invariably subject their notebooks to substantially more wear and tear than their office-based counterparts.

Moreover, while they may not have particular performance requirements, they can be very stringent about other necessary functionality. Wireless WAN connectivity, for example, is an absolute necessity for most, while a tablet conversion option may be a priority for verticals like real estate and insurance.

"Just about all of my business is project-based," says John Moelter of Mobilintel, a Norcross, Ga.-based VAR that specializes in field users.

"Break-fix isn't really part of my business plan, and what service there is on the hardware mostly goes back to Panasonic," he adds. Given the amount of custom work that goes into these projects, we should have our hands full for the foreseeable future."

Opportunity Knocks
No matter which submarket they target, notebook sales do offer a number of advantages for solution providers. Most obvious is the price premium over desktop PCs; it may be small at the low end, but it does add up. They also generally have a faster refresh rate and allow for additional margin on sales of redundant or specialized peripherals, like batteries and docking stations.

"No one's going to bring their monitor, speakers or keyboard when they take their laptop home for the night. You're going to sell them all that, plus an extra battery," Toshiba's Roberts says.

More significant, however, are the solutions and services that can be built around notebooks. Mobility requires more than just smaller and lighter hardware, and clients need more help to take advantage of the opportunities that hardware provides.

"Laptops mean wireless networks, they mean remote access, they mean extra security," says J.R. Guthrie of Advantage Micro in Tucson, Ariz. "All of those need service, training and support."

Clients understand the productivity gains that mobility solutions offer them, and they know how it will affect their bottom lines.

Give them what they need and they'll be happy to affect your bottom line as well.

NEXT: 3 technologies that could shake up the notebook world.