Out of the Box

I had questioned how Dell would respond to the challenge of the Mini-Note after Michael Dell said that it would, and the preliminary answer seems to be “very well” as it has taken the high-design route. The mini-Inspiron has a lowered hinge like the MacBook Air and HP Mini-Note and the glossy red cover is strongly reminiscent of he Lenovo IdeaPad U110. In at least one picture, though, the Dell logo looks upside down when it is facing others.

Things I immediately like about the mini-Inspiron just from the picture include more traditional trackpad button layout versus the Mini-Note and a better screen to form factor fit. However, my concern is that both of these have come at the expense of the keyboard, which looks smaller than the Mini-Note’s (but hopefully bigger than the Eee’s). It also looks less chunky than other products in the class although that may just be an illusion of the photo angle. The big unresolved questions, of course, include specs (including battery life), and price.

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So, obviously, small notebooks aren’t the only products that are being attacked by low-cost competition. RCA is back in the game with a trio of smaller Small Wonders, two of which are priced for less than $100. I liked the first generation of RCA’s spin on the Pure Digital technology powering the Flip series and have put in a request to see if RCA is still using Pure Digital’s stuff, but my guess is it’s not.

The new RCA generation seems slick and the size and price are certainly in the right direction. As it did with its  MP3 players, RCA is including a weather-resistant model. However, as with the recently reviewed Creative Vado, we’ll have to see if the video capture quality disappoints.

The CNet blog post bemoans that an HD version hasn’t materialized and I am frankly a little surprised that we’re not seeing those at this point. This will likely be the last generation that is not capable of at least 720p. I’m also disappointed that a planned standalone DVD recorder for the Small Wonder never seemed to materialize.

With Creative’s unusual product portfolio now including these low-end camcorders, who’s next? Sony’s already in the game with the GC1. I’d say other good candidates are Samsung and Logitech, maybe even Microsoft, playing off the latter two’s Webcam businesses.

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OMG, GMTA! Engadget and Gizmodo have both posted mini-treatises (the latter less mini) on terminology for small, inexpensive notebooks, answering the call of a comment on one of my posts a while back.

Analysts love to put things in boxes (and I deal with my share), but I think it’s probably too early to start getting into semantic taxonomies. That may be prejudiced by working at a firm that substantially tracks technology products after they ship and often after they reach a high enough volumes to penetrate retail. Nevertheless, the terms being bandied about for these products are tainted by older contexts that the Gizmodo article doesn’t fully explain, even though they do reference the Libretto, one of the earlier subnotebooks.

Speaking of which, I view ultraportables as a synonym for subnotebooks. The former term began being used by notebook manufacturers who didn’t like the idea of their lightest smallest wonders being referred to as “below” notebooks.

Anyway, here’s how I break down these products using a lot of the vernacular currently being thrown around:

Update: Intel (or parties therein) is now referring to the mini-note category as a “netbook” which people might remember was a name given to the Psion Series 7-type device years ago. I’m not wild about this term because I think it implies too much of a thin client approach, particularly as these PCs are increasingly shipping with Windows. It may be catchier, though, than “mini-note” (which I think has more momentum now, and which somehow has a more European flavor (Minitel?). In any case, I’ve added it as a name to the device class.

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I was especially skeptical about Akimbo from the first time I saw its set-top box, and things didn’t improve much when I finally got to try it out a while before the company’s last-gasp business model switch. However, I thought it had a chance to cash in on long-tail content in the heat of the YouTube frenzy. It seems, though, that the YouTube brand and breadth of free content drove manufacturers to add that instead of the managed semi-pro Akimbo portfolio.

Indeed, this obituary cites double (and sometimes triple) dipping and thin content as the double-barreled smoking gun that killed Akimbo. One note, though, is that it’s not exactly apt to lump Sezmi in with the likes of Akimbo or especially the Roku Netflix box as Sezmi is designed to compete head-to-head with cable and offer very mainstream programming.

By the way, I started one of my first professional writing projects using an killer (both in features and system requirements) word processor for the Mac called FullWrite Professional that was sold late in its life by a company called Akimbo after once being sold by PC database king Ashton-Tate.. It made Microsoft Word (especially on the Mac) look like amateur hour in its day.

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