New age for notebooks

For years, portable computers were second-class citizens in the Republic of Computing and were seen as auxiliary machines, adjuncts to the muscle machines on or below the desk, reports The New York Times.

They were expensive, underpowered and, in the early years, much too large for anyone then to call them 'laptops' or 'notebooks'.

Today, notebooks are second class no more. More notebook machines will be sold worldwide this year than desktops, the first time in the industry's history, according to the research firm IDC. In the US the milestone has already been reached: last year, notebook sales passed those for desktops.

PC shipments across the world including India declined quite significantly during the last two quarters, an offshoot of the global financial meltdown, according to Business Standard.

However, that has not dampened the spirit of the PC vendors regarding the opportunities that emerging markets like India still hold.

A report by Mait, the apex body that represents the hardware sector in India, the total PC sales between October and December 2008 were 1.4 million units, registering a decline of 19% over the same period last fiscal.

Mobility is the way forward for Intel in 2009 with the number of notebooks outselling PCs and the vendor recording one of its highest sales for its mobile processor Atom in the third quarter of 2008, touching $200 million, says Emirates Business 24/7.

Samir Al Schamma, GM of Intel GCC, attributes high sales to the increasing usage of netbooks. With so much emphasis on mobility, growth from desktops cannot be underestimated.

As desktops face competition from netbooks there is also the emergence of another product category called nettops (a smaller version of the desktop used for Web applications), which will be another strong competitor.