Notebooks: The Next Generation

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When Steve Jobs slipped the featherweight MacBook Air out of a manila envelope at this year's MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, announcing that Apple Inc. had created the "world's thinnest notebook," the world gasped at what the company known for its cool, cutting-edge products had come up with next.

The machine was sleek, measuring 0.76 inches at its widest and tapering down to 0.12 inches. It weighed about 3 pounds. It was shiny. Its keyboard lit up. It had a solid-state hard drive so it would run silently. Its glossy screen was just plain pretty. And, when Jobs opened it, it looked as if he could have been opening a magazine.

With the MacBook Air, the notebook world found its fashionista—a notebook for movers and shakers who want a light, fully functional PC and who also want to be the envy of everyone else in the airport lounge.

Meanwhile, across the country, Lenovo was working on the anti-MacBook Air, the ThinkPad W700. If the MacBook Air is like a butterfly, the ThinkPad W700 is like a tiger.

With dual hard drives, quad-core processors and a 17-inch screen with a built-in color calibrator, this beast is no show-off. It's a powerhouse, designed for photographers and digital video professionals who need power, storage and don't need to cart the almost 10-pound machine between meetings.

Thinner and lighter, or heavier and more powerful? You choose. With notebook computers now, the sky's the limit.

Evolutionary Trends
Notebooks are putting the personal back in personal computer, and vendors are tailoring their products to suit niche markets, taking the standard form-factor for the notebook computer and blowing it out of the water with innovation, options and power.

And as notebooks evolve into more personalized, more niche products while simultaneously becoming the mainstream PC form factor, where does the opportunity for VARs lie and how can you harness the variety of options to make more successful, targeted sales?

And while the consumer market offers things like faux-bamboo casings and scented notebooks, where is innovation in the business world?

"Notebooks are evolving like cars. Back in the day, cars were pretty much meant for transportation, and now if you look at cars, they're designed for style and the way they're being used. Today you're seeing hybrids and everything else, and I think you're seeing notebook computers follow a similar trail," said Wes Williams, worldwide ThinkPad marketing manager for Lenovo, Research Triangle Park, N.C.

"You're seeing a trend to very, very small, lightweight, long-battery-life computers like the ThinkPad S10 that we announced," Williams said. "There's certainly a category of people like that that want a machine [they] can put in their pocketbooks. On the other end of the spectrum, you're seeing other types of verticals come up where people need machines to do different things."

Lenovo, for example, designed the ThinkPad W700 for digital content creators and worked with professionals in the industry to determine which features and which form-factors they wanted, like a 17-inch high-end screen, a color calibrator and serious processing power with the option of an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.

While some machines are getting bigger, others, like the MacBook Air and the Toughbook U1 ultra-mobile rugged PC, are getting smaller.

Panasonic Computer Solutions Co., known as the industry's leader in ruggedized mobile computers, launched the Toughbook U1 this year, giving the world its first fully functional rugged computer that you can fit in the palm of your hand.

With a miniature full keyboard and weighing in at about 2 pounds, it uses Intel's Atom processor and can run Microsoft Windows and Windows-based applications like any desktop computer. It's also ruggedized to exceed the military's standards for ruggedness. Optional features include a bar code scanner and a camera.

As with the ThinkPad W700, users drive innovation at Panasonic, said Kyp Walls, director of product management at Panasonic.

"The reason we do anything that we do is because customers have told us that's important to them. We first integrated a camera into a notebook at the behest of a government agency that was needing to take a lot of pictures along with estimates they were doing and reports they were doing," Walls said.

Next: Hits And Misses

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