PC companies bring laptops to the masses

Gone are the days when laptops were a luxury. As people become more mobile, and the need to access and store information anytime, anywhere becomes a necessary business and research tool, notebooks have become commonplace.

Thanks to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project which, while not yet altogether successful in lowering the price of a notebook to $100 (Dh387), has nevertheless been able to send on a message to manufacturers that what the world – especially the developing nations – needs is affordable PCs.

Earlier this year, Asus' Eee laptops – with prices ranging from $300 to $400 – topped the Amazon.com best-seller list for notebook computers.

Eee, an abbreviation of Asus's slogan "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play", has a feeble processor, a small seven-inch screen, a two to four gigabytes of storage, weighs less than a kilogram and can connect to the internet wirelessly.

Yet the Eee is being seen as more indicative of the future of computers than Apple's pricey MacBook Air, the wafer-thin laptop, which costs more than $1,000.

It didn't take long for others to follow. As early as January, Acer was reported to be planning to enter the low-cost arena. By the end of February, Acer confirmed to Emirates Business that it would be the first to provide ultra-mobile PCs in the region within the third quarter of this year.

The PC, which was launched even earlier to stay ahead of the competition, is called Aspire.

It runs on a Linux environment, weighs less than a kilo, features a 95 per cent full-sized keyboard and has a sub-9in LCD screen.

Priced between Dh1,500 to Dh1,900, the Aspire series offers a specially developed mail software application that can manage up to six separate e-mail accounts in a single window, while the messenger programme can simultaneously handle the most popular IM accounts.

Acer has thus become the first top-tier computer company to launch a low-cost laptop in the region, confirming the emergence of a new sub-notebook market segment. Acer, which currently ranks third next to HP and Dell, expects that the introduction of low-cost laptops will catapult it over the competition.

"With this, our computer penetration can grow five times the current size. If the affordability is increased then the market will grow very rapidly," said Krishna Murthy, Deputy Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey and Africa.

Leading PC and server manufacturer HP is also planning to join the low-cost craze. With the success of HP's 2133 Mini-Note, it was expected that the company would be working up a second edition and, according to Jerel Chong, HP Australia's Market Development Manager for Notebook PCs, it is "looking at a similar device but at a lower cost".

Reportedly, the low-cost laptop will be ready for budget-conscience consumers sometime before 2009. The HP 2133 Mini-Note, like the Asus Eee, is targeted at the education market. Priced around $375, the machine has a starting weight of 1.27kg. The system is designed to survive classroom life with a sturdy yet lightweight anodised aluminium shell and HP's 3D DriveGuard to protect the hard disk against damage.

Dell, who used to reign in the number one spot, will also flex its muscles in the low-cost game. On Wednesday, Dell will have its simultaneous worldwide launch of its Vostro units, Emirates Business has learned .

Dell Vostro, a new suite of notebooks, is designed exclusively for small businesses with up to 25 employees, simple or no networks and limited or no in-house IT support. "Vostro is an existing product line which we will expand. Expansion will include more affordable entry level notebooks," Michael Collins, General Manager, Dell Middle East told this paper.

"Affordable notebooks are the way to go," he said.

"Low-cost laptops will address certain segments, specifically first-time users where the barrier to entry is too prickly a price. So if you can get to a price point where notebooks are more affordable for more people then you become successful.

"We should want as many people to own laptops because PCs make information available and information is a wonderful thing to have. We want people to communicate across the globe so putting technology in the hands of people at more affordable prices is fantastic," Collins said.

Lenovo said it also plans to sell a low-cost laptop computer – known as a netbook – for £279 (Dh2,064). The PC maker will join Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Asus in the market for cheaper laptops, which are designed mainly for web surfing, e-mailing, playing movies and music and other basic functions. The IdeaPad will have a keyboard 85 per cent as large as that on a regular laptop and will come initially in two sizes – one with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive (for £279), the other with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive (for £319).

The machines are expected to cost $400 and $449 respectively in the US.

Meanwhile, One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit organisation founded by Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed the XO, a bright-green laptop with protruding antenna ears that currently costs $188 to produce. The aim has been to reduce its cost to just $100. Negroponte revealed the idea in November 2005 at the World Summit on the Information Society conference in Tunisia.

Two-and-a-half years after it was unveiled, the machine still has some cost reductions to make and only about 300,000 of the devices have been distributed.

And in recent months, several senior officials have departed from OLPC.

OLPC lost its chief technology officer in January when Mary Lou Jepsen left to start her own low-cost laptop company. Pixel Xi is aiming for a $75 or even a $50 laptop in the next two to three years.

"Computers have been an exception. If you look at consumer electronics, a DVD player 10 years ago was about $800 – now they sell for $20," she said. "The computer industry has been able to keep the price flat by focusing on gazillion-gigahertz machines running really bloated software and that's worked for years since the IBM PC revolution."

The Classmate PC made by Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, is arguably a direct rival to the XO.

In July 2007, Intel joined the OLPC project but pulled out in January. Its departure stemmed from a rivalry between the Classmate and the XO, which take very different approaches to promoting low-cost computers in the developing world.

The XO is a radical, clean-sheet design that runs the Linux operating system under a graphical interface called Sugar.

The Classmate, by contrast, is a full-fledged but cheap laptop, costing $300 to $500 that runs Windows.

Intel's promotional literature, touting the Classmate's "real PC capabilities" looked like a swipe at the XO.

Currently, the XO low-cost laptop experiment is under way. The non-profit partnered with Birmingham, Alabama, – at the behest of Mayor Larry Langford and Birmingham City Council – for the first large-scale educational deployment of low-cost XO laptops in the US.

The pilot programme, running from April 15 to September 1, began with 1,000 of the group's $200 laptops being distributed to students in Glen Iris Elementary School. After some bureaucratic squabbles, the school board went on to approve the city's purchase of 14,000 more – funded by taxpayers money – with plans to eventually include all 15,000 students in the school system's first through eighth grades.

Some critics, however, wonder whether a computer initially designed for children in poor, rural parts of the world, and primarily using its own non-Windows operating system, is the right learning tool for students who eventually will seek a general computer-literate population.

Others worry that teachers will have trouble getting up to speed. Even more are concerned that it could be difficult to track progress and achievement on machines that promote a constructive approach to learning, which could pose a problem in today's educational climate of high-stakes testing and accountability.

Although there are concerns, the fact remains that OLPC opens up the road for more affordable laptops.

Thanks to its ambitious goals, the low-cost notebook revolution has thus begun.

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