"how about shrinking the notebooks?"
Well, sure if you can get it down to the size of a PDA, in which case you'd have to lose some features that are limited by their size (CD-ROM drives come to mind, big screen for movies & games, speakers). Power consumption is also a big concern. I think Palm's standby/use time for two AA (or is it AAA) batteries is several weeks, which is pretty hard for the current crop of PCs to beat. In any case, there is clearly a convergence of sorts going on. There is no doubt that the technology of miniaturization is going to make large capacity drives available to PDAs in the future (if I remember correctly IBM already has a 400 MB drive the size of a matchbox, which it unveiled last year). The trickier part is solving the power issues. I don't have much information about battery technology, but gauging by the longer and longer standby/talk time in cellular phones, I have to believe that there is some progress there.
MSFT, to its credit, has spotted the convergence trend fairly early in the game and is working to point people in the direction of CE. Unlike the PC era, however, MSFT has a lot more competition these days (this time from US and non-US based companies), so it's going to be very interesting to see what happens. But even if CE doesn't become a huge standard like Windows on the PC, there should be enough work out there for the market to remain attractive to MSFT. What is more important about CE, however, is that it isn't only limited to PDAs. It's supposed to go into anything that has an electronic brain large enough for it (from toasters to cars, I reckon). That, IMO, is a much larger market than PDAs.
Sorry for digressing. You can tell I like this topic :)
Winston |
