Battery Will Get You Everywhere

Take note ? the notebook is here to stay. And as its technologies improve, it looks like it is catching up with its big brother, the desktop. Chris Long reports

It has been an interesting 15 years watching the ups and downs of the PC market. It is like a billion dollar roller-coaster ride as one bit of hardware makes another obsolete or the introduction of one piece of software changes the way we work overnight.

Compared with other technologies that have changed the way we live, the 15 years of the PC is nothing more than a photo flash in the lifetime of the product. The steam train, the motor car, even TV and radio had the decency to take a little longer to evolve.

But if we think the PC is a fast developer, what about its lightweight sibling, the notebook? The technologies that drive the notebook market have only really been on fast forward since the mid to late 80s. Compaq?s first ?portable? offering back in 1982 did have a handle, but that?s a bit like screwing a handle on the side of your house and telling people you live in a tent.

The different technologies that comprise the portable market have been rushing both to keep up with the desktop and to develop some kind of speciality of their own. Perhaps the best example is the LCD screen ? its research and development was paid for by the laptop market, but it may one day end up on the desktop. All the same, most other technologies find themselves simply miniaturised ?me too? products, small hand-me-downs from the desktop.

But things seem to have changed slightly over the past two to three years. The notebook seems to find itself in an odd situation ? for a start it doesn?t seem to be getting much smaller. This isn?t to say that portable computers aren?t getting any smaller, oh no, but the fact that the notebook is still with us means something.

One of the unsung advantages of the early days of portable computing was muscle development and toning. Some of the early portables could be better used as battering rams than as PCs.

It was apparent that the market was aware of this from what we called them: transportables (which weren?t); luggables (only just); lunchbox computers (just about luggable) and portable (see lunchbox). Never were they called lightweight or feather light. Even the note- book in its slimmed down phone book size was never notebook size, and it was really the first true portable.

Thus we know that notebook development has started to level out because we are still using the term notebook. Despite the growing market around the personal digital assistant, the notebook factor is still with us. This at least suggests that the market has settled down and we won?t continue to see the latest products made obsolete when they are six months old.

And there is good news on the move from the desktop machine to portable. ?We are finding the notebook as a desktop replacement is gaining ground, in that people who need to be mobile are buying a notebook as their main machine,? says Rob Grange, product marketing and technical services manager at Zenith Data Systems.

This raises the issue of upgrading notebooks; do companies really have a notebook upgrade path in mind when they buy? ?You can certainly get to the higher level, but it is more expensive than upgrading a desktop and the thing that notebooks carry is that price premium,? says Grange. Companies are looking for a longer life span from their notebooks and the whole upgrade issue is avoided.

That leads to the obvious question: with the technology moving as fast as it does now, would laptops ever catch up with their desktop siblings?

Grange isn?t hopeful: ?They will never ever catch up. There will always be something that lags behind the desktop.

?Take the screen ? as soon as you put a bigger panel in there it hits the battery life. Same thing as putting a bigger processor in ? you will always need a more powerful battery.?

All the same there are some areas where the notebook is making serious inroads ? screen size and resolution for instance. The basic notebook screen offers VGA at 640 x 480, although a growing number have moved up to SVGA at 800 x 600, while both resolutions will give you 256 colours.

Grange thinks this is important: ?What has really enabled them to take on the desktop is the screen panel size. We have a panel screen with a 12.1in screen that can do 1024 x 768.? Although he agrees that the character size would be smaller than a user would like, he insists that down to something like 800 x 600 it would be fine.

And there is more coming from the research and development people. ?We are looking at the new panels coming down the line that will let you run 1024 x 768 in the same effective screen size area as a CRT monitor.?

It doesn?t stop there either. Cambridge Display Technology has developed a light emitting polymer (LEP) technology that has been licensed by Philips. The LEP technology is designed to permit thinner displays that operate at lower voltages and consume less energy.

There are also field emission displays (FEDs) that perform in a similar way to traditional CRT monitors. They could also be roped in as a possible LCD alternative. And in late September last year, scientists at Sandia National Laboratories announced a breakthrough related to surface chemistry in phosphor FED technology. Their discovery, they say, could ultimately lead to the replacement of LCDs.

Although these screen technologies appear promising, the LCD screen will still rule the roost in 1997. To spice up the situation, a few companies have announced 13.3in panel notebook displays, which will bring them very close to a standard CRT monitor.

One system that has moved directly from the desktop arena is processor upgrades. Notebook manufacturers are moving away from welding the processor on to the mother board and are using Zif (zero insertion force) sockets. This raises the question: will MMX processors make a difference?

According to Grange, this is an area where the notebook has really caught up. ?There was this gap at one time where the desktops moved on to Pentium but the notebooks really hadn?t caught up.? he says. ?But we?ve just announced 150 and 166 MHz MMX notebooks and that technology gap isn?t anywhere near as great.?

All well and good, but surely the Pentium Pro defines the top of the heap on the desktop these days? Grange isn?t wholly convinced: ?Although the desktops have moved on to Pentium Pro in principle, the uptake there is still quite small because there isn?t so much need for it at this time.?

Intel is playing the game by making the chips power management friendly with a 2.45V core, drawing 3.3V externally.

But once you talk about power you arrive at the Achilles? heel of the notebook: the battery. The new lithium ion batteries are lighter and have longer life than the older nickel cadmium (Nicad) or nickel metal hydride batteries that vendors traditionally have used. Alas at least one of the downsides is that lithium ion batteries are more expensive than Nicad.

Manufacturers have wanted to go down the lithium ion route since 1995, but after some semi-spectacular failures it hasn?t happened. Grange still thinks it will happen though: ?The market went through a transition in 1996 where the cost of lithium ion made it impossible to put it on low-end products ? but in 1997 we are seeing lithium ion in most, if not all products.? As long as the problems are sorted out.

A technology that offers hope is lithium polymer. Expected to hit the market late this year, lithium polymer offers more power benefits than commonly used batteries, because it can be shaped around items in the notebooks cavities ? taking up less space.

And then, of course, there are the smart batteries which we hear of regularly but never seem to see. Smart batteries will offer better power management systems by relaying more accurate information about their status than current batteries can. Just don?t hold your breath waiting for it.

Is there still a market for docking stations? Grange is decidedly ambivalent: ?We still have a couple of devices that use a docking station, but you don?t really need a monitor because the screen is quite big, and the latest keyboards are closer to full size, so the need for a docking station is less.?

Unfortunately, the main problem with docking stations is that manufacturers insist on changing the design of their notebooks, and if the new notebook?s docking socket doesn?t line up with the old docking station socket, you are, in the vernacular, stuffed. This is doubly frustrating if you are moving from desk to desk and trying to find a docking station to take your notebook.

To this end, a lot of notebooks feature the new IRDA infra-red connection which supports a transfer rate of 4Mbit. With one of these you wouldn?t need a docking station because all the I/O would be handled by the infra-red connection and, given the general improvement of the other notebook technologies, the docking station would effectively be a thing of the past.

But one of the big drivers of the market has turned out to be the operating system. Windows NT 4 has helped to define the platform that a lot of corporates want. It is ironic that notebook sales can somehow be connected to Windows NT, but it certainly seems to be the case.

The logic goes thus: Windows 3 is running out or has already run out of steam and a company needs to replace it, but Windows 95 isn?t the product to replace it. With Windows NT, users can have an operating system that has some of the security and stability features that they want, they can buy their desktops to match, and then load Windows 95 on to their notebooks for a (supposedly) seamless network.

Grange has seen that trend at Zenith. ?There is a transition at the moment as the old Dos and Windows environments are getting a bit long in the tooth and we are seeing some major investment to upgrade to the new environment,? he says.

If Windows 3 is that old, why didn?t people take Windows 95 when that came out? ?When the big launch of Windows 95 happened 18 months or so ago, everyone said ?I?m not going to jump, Microsoft has launched operating systems before and they?ve not worked very well, I?m going to wait,?? says Grange. ?And the corporates, I believe, hung on until Windows NT 4 came out.

?And now we are seeing the corporates making their decisions because they can?t hold on much longer.?

But it isn?t actually Windows NT that the companies want to run on notebooks. ?There is one company we deal with that has, in principle, made a decision to go to NT across both desktops and notebooks,? says Grange. ?The reality is, because of the restricted support for PCMCIA cards and plug-and-play devices, Windows 95 has come out very much as a notebook operating system.?

Perhaps one reason users did not buy Windows 95 when it was launched was that they were waiting for the specification profile to settle down. Grange suggests that current buyers aren?t buying the original Microsoft specification of 8Mb. ?We are seeing companies typically going for 16Mb to run Windows 95,? says Grange. ?And for Windows NT they are either going for 24 or 32Mb.?

So 1997 will, with a bit of luck, see the notebook consolidate its position as its technologies mature. The desktop stays unassailable with all the technological breaks going its way. All the same, there must come a point where both notebooks and desktops will address users? wants and at this rate it?s going to happen sooner than later.