ChromeOS, which runs mini laptops from Acer, Asus, and Samsung among other partners, may soon follow Windows 8 in making touch a core part of the laptop user experience. According to a report from Taiwan, Google is testing the waters with a small run of touch-compatible Chromebooks, to be released under Google’s own Nexus brand.

According to the report, Compal will be providing components for 20 million units, set to start shipping late this year. That’s a large number for a device with limited commercial success so far — Google has not released sales figures for any generation of Chromebook yet.

Chromebooks, which you can buy from Google directly as well as from partners such as Best Buy, feature an operating system based on the Chrome browser. With minimal local storage and intelligence, the laptops — netbooks, really — are essentially cloud devices, booting in seconds, needing little or no configuration, and plugging users directly into the Google ecosystem of search, docs, and other tools, plus anything else online. They’re cheap as well, priced at between $200 and $500, or leasable, starting at $30/month.

Adding touch may be a sign that Google plans to launch a convertible device similar to Lenovo’s Windows 8 devices where the screen flips, rotates, or even detaches from the keyboard. Or Google may simply be experimenting with the existing clamshell devices. Either way, price will go up as component costs for touchscreens get added into the mix.

Any device launch is not likely until sometime well into 2013.

Hat tip: PCmag

A year late, Google has finally solved one of the central problems with its Chromebooks: pricing.

Announced today, the latest Samsung-designed Chromebook will run for $249 — half the price of previous models.

That’s a big deal, as it makes it far easier to justify buying the Chromebook as a second computer (which is exactly what Google has wanted from the beginning).

Some of the reason for the device’s lower price is its mobile-focused ARM processor, which allowed Samsung to eliminate the need for internal fans.

Samsung was also able to cut costs by limiting the Chromebook’s storage to 16GB. While that won’t satisfy most users’ needs, Google is offering buyers 100GB of Google Drive storage to compensate. That’s a smart, if predictable, strategy for the company.

Sadly, that cost-cutting also means the latest Chromebook is still stuck with the same 6.5-hour battery life as its predecessor. It also means the device features the same unremarkable build quality as previous models. But for $249, you can only complain about it so much.

The Chromebook will be the latest device from Google to be sold via the Google Play store, which is already home to the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus.

Dell will stop producing its Inspiron Mini line of netbooks and has no plans to release any devices in the mini notebook category, the company told The Verge.

The company is now focusing its attention on pricier Ultrabooks, the red hot new category of devices inspired by Apple’s popular MacBook Air. “Thin and powerful is where it is at for us,” Dell’s marketing director Alison Gardner told The Verge.

Scrapping the netbook business is the wise thing to do. Research shows that tablet sales are booming while netbook sales are tanking. And, in Western Europe, Gartner calculated a more than 40 percent decrease in netbook shipments in the third quarter of 2011.

Still, it’s a bittersweet sign that an era — albeit a short one, as netbooks only date back to late 2007 — has come to end. Viva la ultrabook.

[Red sunset image via Shutterstock]

The company will team up with Intel on a $200-$250 light-weight netbook featuring either Google’s Chrome operating system or Android Honeycomb 3.0, according to a Digitimes report based on sources from an Asus components maker.

The line of netbooks, the report states, will target people seeking a low-cost device primarily for work or Internet browsing and is said to have a June 2011 launch date. Asus plans to ship six million in 2011.

With iPad 2 launch sales close to 1 million in its first weekend, it’s arguable that Asus’ netbook strategy is too late to make a large enough impact to translate into success.

A low price point is perhaps the biggest advantage netbooks have over tablets to stay competitive. At roughly half the cost of wifi-only versions of the iPad 2 ($499) and Motorola Xoom ($599), an Asus low-cost netbook could reasonably grab a portion of the market.

But while it might be cost-effective to use Chrome OS — which hasn’t been in the news much since Google launched its Chrome OS pilot program — Asus would still be going on the assumption that people will want to use it.

Acer was suffering from declining netbook sales — people who previously bought netbooks started looking into tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad. The momentum for consumer PCs, Acers strong segment, is waning. Meanwhile, corporate demand remains strong, and that is Dell’s core business.

Hewlett-Packard is still the number one PC maker, with 13.6 percent sequential growth from the previous quarter. Dell’s shipments remained flat, but Acer’s fell 12.9 percent.

Overall, the PC market has rebounded from the recession of 2009. Global PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2010 amounted to 93.1 million units, up 5.7 percent from 88.1 million in the third quarter of 2010, and a 4.7 percent increase from 88.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2009. PC shipments during the fourth quarter hit a new quarterly record, blowing past the previous high of 88.9 million units set in the fourth quarter of 2009.

The growth came from desktop computers. “Desktop sales in the fourth quarter were buoyed by strong corporate demand,” HIS iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins said. “The corporate PC segment continues to outperform the consumer market as companies replace systems with newer, faster, more efficient computers.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Goodbye netbook, hello tablet.

Taiwanese computer maker Acer is phasing out its netbook series of ultra-small computers with the forthcoming release of new Android tablets, which are due in the first half of 2011, according to a Computerworld report.

Acer’s announcement marks for the company a move away from the netbook-style computer — a category which helped fuel Acer’s rapid growth and profitability — in favor of the tablet.

Tablets are seen as a vital category for all computer makers, as evidenced by Apple’s insanely popular iPad and the fervor with which other device makers are entering the market. Acer’s decision is further proof that manufacturers are treating the tablet as a serious alternative for personal computing and not just a fad. As Acer’s sales manager Lu Bing-hsian put it in the report, “They [the new tablets] are aimed at phasing out netbooks. That’s the direction of the market.”

While Lu was short on details, it seems Acer’s new tablets – with 7- and 10-inch displays – are going to run Google’s Android operating system and use Intel’s Sandy Bridge four-core processors. The processors could prove to be a competitive edge for Acer, as the quad-core Sandy Bridges will make the tablets some of the fastest on the market.

Lu indicated in the report that the company still intends to make netbooks (and the company recently introduced a laptop/tablet hybrid, the Iconia), which have so far been a popular low-cost alternative to an actual laptop and a successful line of products for the company, but will manufacture fewer of them than previously.

The new tablets will also be aimed for “common users” with the same kind of computing needs once serve by netbooks, rather than gamers or casual media consumers who flick through digital magazines or watch YouTube videos. This would mean that Acer is betting users will embrace the tablet for content creation, not just consumption. That’s a challenge, considering that some users still struggle to type email on a tablet touchscreen. But if Acer, long a champion of the netbook, is right, it looks like the small, cheap laptop is facing extinction.

The new MacBook Air from Apple is one of the devices that sits right at this intersection of work and play. It’s great for entertainment, offering you the full Mac OS operating system and all of its applications for play. But it can also run full web browsers, Microsoft Office, and other work-related applications too. And perhaps a plus for your social life, it makes you look cool while you’re working or playing.

I’ve played around with one for a bit, and I like the fact that it stands on this divide. With an iPad, I can sit in front of the TV with the family and browse through entertainment functions. For the most part, everybody knows that I’m just sort of snacking on information while I’m watching TV.

With a MacBook Air, I can pretend to work. Or I can pretend to play. Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, described the MacBook Air as a hybrid of the MacBook laptops and the iPad tablet computer. At some point, the MacBook devices will be able to run apps designed to run on the Mac OS. Once again, that helps blur the lines, allowing you to quickly fire up an app while you’re doing something else.

If I were just working, a plain vanilla Windows laptop would be fine. But this MacBook Air is sexy. You can take it someplace and show it off. People will stop and ask you about it. It’s a social tool. And I’ll wager that a lot of people, particularly young folks, aren’t drawing as clear a line between work and play as they used to — and are multitasking much more than they used to do, too.

The 11.6-inch or 13.3-inch screens are great for sharing, allowing you to show someone what you’re looking at easily. It is just 0.68 inches thick at its thickest part and a tenth of an inch at its thinnest; it weighs just 2.9 pounds and has a precision aluminum case. So the device is much more mobile than past laptops.

The MacBook Air’s all-flash memory storage is an important step forward. Normally, laptops and desktops use hard disk drives. They take a while to boot up. Since it uses faster chip-based flash technology, the MacBook Air can wake up from sleep mode instantly or boot up from a cold start in about 17 seconds. It takes about six seconds to shut down. The flash memory is about twice as fast as a hard drive.

And Apple places the flash memory chips directly on the system board (motherboard), so it doesn’t have bulky packaging. That allows it to have bigger batteries. Battery life is five hours (for 11.6-inch model) to seven hours (13.3-inch model) with heavy wireless use; standby time is 30 days.

That means you can whip it open while you’re doing something else and get to what you want quickly. That’s a requirement for any device that purports to straddle the line between work and play.

The $999 model comes with an 11.6-inch LED backlit screen, Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics, a 1.4 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 64 gigabytes of flash memory storage. Other models cost $1,199 for 128 gigabytes of storage; the 13-inch model with 128 gigabytes costs $1,299, and the 13-inch with 256 gigabytes costs $1,599. Those prices aren’t as out of reach as the original MacBook Air that was introduced in January, 2008, at $1,800.

This device is also more functional than the older MacBook Air. It has Apple’s FaceTime video camera on it, allowing you to make video phone calls to other MacBook Air users or to those with iPhone 4 phones. That makes it more unique than some of the laptops or netbooks out there, though Skype video calling is still an option for many rival machines.

The MacBook Air comes with Apple’s Snow Leopard version of the Mac OS X operating system and the iLife ’11 software suite for editing videos or photos and for making music.

Besides having no hard drive, the device doesn’t have an optical DVD drive. That means you can’t play DVD movies while on the run, but with applications such as Netflix, Hulu, and Vudu, that’s not such a big deal anymore. You can stream movies or TV shows over the air to the device via Wi-Fi connectivity. While it does have an Nvidia graphics chip for good 3D graphics, you’re not likely going to play heavy-duty games on this device.

Of the two models, the 13-inch has more features, such as an SD card slot for easily loading photos, On the smaller model, you have to rely on universal serial bus (USB) 2.0 ports or Bluetooth wireless for photo transfers. The MacBook Air has a huge multi-touch trackpad that lets you pinch, swipe, drag, rotate and scroll.

You can connect the device to a 27-inch desktop display. Since the devices have a relatively small amount of storage, you’re probably going to need to store most of your music, videos, photos and documents on a desktop computer still. So we’re not quite at the day when all you need is just a laptop. But the MacBook Air is pretty close to being the only computing device you’ll need, if you really wanted to have just one.

Apple took a long time to come out with this redesign. If it were any other company, it would probably be far behind the other computer makers who come up with lots of different designs every quarter, hoping that one would appeal to a certain kind of crowd. But by taking its time, Apple has done a great job. It has taken the art of designing the hybrid computer — the kind that blends work and play — and moved it forward by leaps and bounds.

HP hit its overall earnings, but the growth was driven by enterprise growth, not consumer sales.

Todd Bradley, head of the consumer-focused Personal Systems Group at HP, said on the earnings call that HP saw a slow start to the back-to-school season in consumer computer sales. He said that back-to-school sales have begun, and now the overall market growth is on track. But he admitted that notebook sales were likely impacted by strong sales of tablets (without specifically mentioning the fast-selling iPad). He said HP is not pursuing market share at all costs by selling lowest-margin PCs.

He said that HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in part to deal with the threat from tablet computers and that HP will launch a new tablet computer based on Microsoft’s Windows software “very soon,” which likely means in the coming weeks. On top of that, he confirmed that HP will launch a tablet based on Palm’s WebOS software in early 2011. Back in January, HP allowed Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer to show off a tablet prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show. Some thought that tablet was dead in the water after HP bought Palm, but that evidently is not true.

Critics have lambasted HP for cutting its costs so much that it failed to invest in research and development under chief executive Mark Hurd. That left the company unprepared for the launch of Apple’s iPhone and iPad. But Cathie Lesjak, chief financial officer and interim chief executive, denied that HP had under-invested in those areas.

“We have three year plans in place with accelerating R&D and sales growth,” Lesjak said. “We have funded a number of initiatives that are still to come.”

Intel is debuting new members of its Atom family of microprocessors today that can be the brains of everything from low-power laptops to razor-thin netbooks.

To show off the new technology at the Computex 2010 trade show in Taiwan, Intel is demonstrating its Atom chips inside a razor-thin “Canoe Lake” platform, which can serve as the electronics for a dual-core netbook that is just 14-millimeters thick (half an inch). With that size, the prototype netbook is the world’s thinnest such device. The thin netbook runs Intel’s “Pine Trail” version of the Atom processors.

Intel makes and sells microprocessors and chip sets that are part of computer platforms, or generic designs for the innards of a machine. Computer makers then take those platforms, customize them, and offer the products for sale. So Intel’s new platforms enable new products across many companies. The Atom family combines computing performance with low power, enabling Intel to get its chips into many low-power devices such as smartphones, netbooks, and tablets.  Intel recently said its latest Atom chips will use 50 times less power during idle operation.

One new customer for Intel’s Atom chips and Linux-based MeeGo operating system software is Chinese car maker HawTai Automobile, which will use the technology in future in-car entertainment systems.

Intel also showed its code-named “Tunnel Creek” Atom processor, which is a system on a chip. That is, it glues together a variety of chips into a single, low-cost chip that can fit in small devices. Tunnel Creek will allow other chip makers to connect their chips to an Intel processor. Intel also has more options that allow any of several operating systems to run on the chips, including MeeGo, Google Android or Chrome, and Windows 7.

Renee James, senior vice president and general manager of software and services at Intel, said that Asus will be the first computer maker to ship a pre-installed version of Intel’s netbook app store, dubbed the Asus AppStore, this fall.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AT&T is about to make it more difficult for new iPhone users to break their contracts. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the carrier will be raising its early termination fee (ETF) for smartphones and 3G netbooks from $175 to $325 as of June 1. An AT&T spokesperson confirmed the news with VentureBeat, and the company has since issued a press release.

The change won’t affect existing customers, only those signing up for new contracts. Still, it’s an opportune time for AT&T to raise its ETF fee — it’s very likely  that Apple will debut its next generation iPhone in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference and make it available for purchase later in the month. The move will make iPhone owners less tempted to jump to another carrier for the iPhone (if it makes its way to Verizon) or another smartphone platform.

The good news out of the announcement is that the ETF for basic and messaging phones will be reduced to $150, and will be reduced by $4 for each month subscribers stay in contract. For smartphones and netbooks, the ETF will be reduced by $10 every month.

The new ETF is still $25 lower than Verizon’s $350 fee, so it’s not as if AT&T’s move is unprecedented. We reported in January that the FCC was looking into early termination fees, and at that point AT&T had defended itself with its $175 ETF, which was lower than most of the competition. We’ve reached out to the FCC for comment regarding AT&T’s ETF increase and will update when we hear back.

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 31. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.

How convenient that Jobs’ return would be confirmed on this day of Easter, the day of celebrated resurrection.

The device will come in at a size larger than the iPhone/iPod touches, yet smaller than any of its laptops, the WSJ reports (this would kind of obvious, though). It’s hard to say what this Apple netbook would look like exactly — it seems none of the Apple tipster sites have yet to get a good grasp on it, but that hasn’t stopped the speculation.

Apple has placed an order for 10-inch touchscreens from a Taiwan distributor for delivery in the third quarter, Reuters reported last month citing its own sources. But, this may not be for a netbook (in fact, a 10-inch screen would actually be on the big side considering most netbooks have screens smaller that that), and rather for the oft-rumored tablet PC that Apple is said to be mulling about.

There’s another possibility too: that these netbook/tablet PC rumors could actually refer to the same device. Microsoft’s Tablet PC, for example, has only found a niche market to date because full-featured PCs with touchscreen capabilities just aren’t in great demand. Related to that, you could argue that tablet PCs are essentially glorified laptops that don’t justify their price.

Consumers have found the netbook alluring because of its small, lightweight size and equally diminutive price. These devices aren’t meant to play the latest and greatest games or high-end applications, and thus contain things like expensive graphic chips — they’re meant to keep things sweet and simple.

A tablet netbook may solve these problems. That is certainly what MacRumors suggests: “Apple’s ongoing research into multi-touch, however, has generated speculation that Apple may incorporate more advanced gesturing into a future device.” In other words, who needs a keyboard, anyway?

The image above shows a netbook Asus EEEPC 1000H running on Google’s mobile operating system Android. Huh? You thought Android was for mobile phones, right? Well, as we’ve written before, Google is planning to use Android for any device — not just the mobile phones.

Besides writing as freelancers for VentureBeat, we also run a startup called Mobile-facts. It took us about four hours of work to compile Android for the netbook. Having done so, we (Daniel Hartmann, that is) got the netbook fully up and running on it, with nearly all of the necessary hardware you’d want (including graphics, sound and the wireless card for internet) running. See the images below for further impressions.

Here’s the significance: Imagine the billion dollar market at stake here if Google can make good on this vision. Netbooks are basically small-scale PCs. For Silicon Valley myriad of software companies, it means a well-backed, open operating system that is open and ripe for exploitation for building upon. Now think of Chrome, Google’s web browser, and the richness it allows developers to build into the browser’s relationship with the desktop — all of this could usher in a new wave of more sophisticated web applications, cheaper and more dynamic to use. Ramifications abound: What does it mean for the stock price of Microsoft? Microsoft currently owns the vast majority of the desktop operating system market share? In recent weeks, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer repeatedly dismissed Android as competition to Windows Mobile.

Back to our experience in compiling Android for the Asus netbooks. It shows us that there is a big technology push to let Android run on netbooks under way.

Based on the progress we see in the Android open source project, we believe that getting an Android netbook to market is doable in as few as three months. Of course, the timing depends as much on decisions by the partners in Google’s OHA alliance and other developers contributing to Android, as it does on Google itself. It is these partners — including device makers and carriers — who decide how and when to adopt Android for different devices and markets. As we note below, Intel is one such contributor working on the adoption of Android to a notebook.

A mass production of the netbooks would be possible between three to nine months, depending on circumstances, two sources familiar with such matters told us. However, as we evaluate the progress of the various OHA projects, we expect conditions for a mass-market netbook to ripen in 2010, rather than in 2009. Right now a variety a of OHA members, announced and unnanounced, are working on projects to set up a sufficient ecosystem.

One important part of the ecosystem would be to have a set of well-functioning applications (an office productivity suite, for example). Google is mostly leaving applications development for Android to third parties (applications which run in the browser like Google Docs being the notable exception). At the rate things are going, we don’t see enough of these third parties developing applications for Android netbooks in the next 12 months. There have been recent predictions about Android netbooks appearing in 2009.

Background

In researching for our Android coverage at VentureBeat, we’ve participated in various Android developer groups and frequently play around with Android to understand some of the issues behind IT. The trigger for us to do the compilation was some news on the Android Porting Google Group. In it, Google developer Dima Zavin claimed a couple of days ago that he ported Android to an Asus EeePC 701. So we decided to have our own go at another Asus netbook.

“Compilation” is a process which needed for a machine such as a PC to be able to use an operating system and understand code. Zavin was compiling Android for a regular Intel CPU, which is what the Asus netbook runs on. The G1 phone, the first commercial mobile phone that Android runs on, however runs on a different processor: the ARM CPU. Taking Zavin’s work as credible, we assumed that compilation wouldn’t take that much time.

Android’s Linux core makes experimental compilations like ours possible. For example, compilations require something called drivers. Drivers are programs which are needed to communicate an operating system like Android with various computer hardware. There are already a lot of Linux drivers, and Linux is able to run on a lot of different computer architectures. Otherwise we’d have needed to build our drivers from scratch.

Android Netbooks coming, but more likely in 2010

We already argued back in August that Android wants to be on any device, not just a phone. Android is designed to run on any device in a category widely referred to as “embedded devices.”

The fact that various OHA partners have already developed Android enough to easily work on our netbook may be considered evidence enough that Google is getting increasing buy-in from industry players to realize this vision. We found two additional indicators that technology is being developed in this direction.

For one, we discovered that Android already has two product “policies” in its code. Product policies are operating system directions aimed at specific uses. The two policies are for 1) phones and 2) mobile internet devices, or MID for short. MID is Intel’s name for ‘mobile internet devices,’ which include devices like the Asus netbook we got Android running on.

The context for our finding can be found here. The important line is this one:
PRODUCT_POLICY
android.policy_phone
android.policy_mid

Another indicator for a coming Android netbook is that Intel already had the right drivers for MID chips in place. You can view some parameter information here.

Overall, we’re impressed with the relative ease of the compilation. Android code is very “portable” and neat. Mainy observers, specifically Symbian supporters, have opined that Android would have problems because of its “open source” nature, leading to “chaotic code” and tendency toward desintegration as developers take the OS in different directions. If true, that could give more controlled OS’s like Symbian, not to mention the iPhone’s, an advantage. Based on our experience with Android, we don’t see that danger mid-term. Quite possibly, Android competitor Symbian does not see that problem either, as the Symbian Foundation also decided to go down an open source path.

Pictures and Observations

After some additional work, the normal webkit browser is working fine on our Asus, and so is the music player. At first, we had problems to get both networking and sound running, though.

The Asus screen size is approximately 5 times bigger than the G1 screen. An adaption of the screen size was not an issue as Android did the adaption automatically.

The open source version of Android does not include Android Market. Therefore we haven’t yet downloaded any apps.

In “Settings,” we stumbled upon the feature “Select locale.” In it, we noticed that the following translations of Android are under way: Czech, German, English (Australia, United Kingdom, Singapore, United States), Spanish, Japanese, German and Dutch. Expect speculation on devices launching in these markets soon.