Reevaluating Laptops

I used to have a small website called Rep's Simple Page where I first started this whole rambling thing. I sucked at HTML and I would put in all the little markup commands by hand, so it was really primitive looking. It would have felt right at home in the 80s. The cool thing about that little site was that for whatever reason, it felt really private. I would voice my most controversial opinions as brashly as I pleased, basically emulating The Best Page in the Universe but without all the humor or wit, because I didn't think anybody would read them. Last night I went through an archive of some of the ramblings I wrote, and between cringing at the grammar I was struck by how crass and raw it was, something I sadly think I've lost since moving my stuff here. Nothing's really changed -- if anything it's more private here, but I write as if I'm trying to be objective; like I've got the reputation of a major journalistic website riding on it. I'm supposed to be angry, goddammit! Fuck objectivity!

But I digress. A lot of my writings back then were relics of their time, reflecting the trends that were occurring then, and in retrospect bringing to mind the trends that I never saw coming. One particularly good example of this was my Laptops vs Netbooks rambling, which I've taken care to upload here. If ever there was a quaint snapshot of the computing world before tablets, that would be it.

The Real Problem with Vita

By my count, I've written about the Vita in-depth four times. One of which was technically about the 3DS, but it came hand-in-hand with many Vita comparisons. I seem unable to talk about one without the other, but I realize now I may have been missing the bigger picture.

It's not hard to do, because it seems like they both target the same market, and it's still a market without any other contenders. But while dedicated gaming handhelds is a two-horse race, both the 3DS and the Vita share a daunting fight with many other mobile devices for essentially the same goal: providing on-the-go entertainment.

The 3DS enjoys the safety of Nintendo's protective sphere of niche appeal. Nintendo will always provide experiences with their own franchises that no others can, and that means they'll always have a certain market to themselves, and one that has been proven over and over again to be non-trivial. Whatever happens in the tablet and smartphone space, they're essentially safe.

Mobile Convergences

I feel it's time to revisit the subject of mobile devices. I've written a couple times on the subject, mostly focusing on ARM processors in doing so. But the subject covers a broad array of design houses, manufacturers, as well as form factors. It's something that's worth looking at from a fresh perspective after it's had some time to evolve further.

The mobile craze really started around the time of the recession, at the height of the economic slump (there's an oxymoron). The iPhone came out in 2007, and took the friendliness of iPods and merged them with the versatility of smartphones, while adding some completely new concepts to the mix. The result was a revolution, and competition was quick to emerge, and eager to make a grab at its potential market.

Around the same time, netbooks were building a lot of steam. They were cheap computers when people couldn't afford to spend very much, and over time even grew to have their own advantages over more expensive alternatives. They evolved into more elegant shapes and sizes, and with more powerful hardware, while offering leading-edge battery life that couldn't be found in many other portable PCs. They were the right product at the right time, and tapped a need in the market that few others had even thought of before.

Updates, updates...

So CES is this week. Palm launched new stuff. Intel launched new stuff. AMD launched new stuff. More importantly, NVIDIA launched new stuff.

NVIDIA has succeeded again in releasing another SoC that everyone wants. Hopefully they succeed this time at actually delivering it to everyone who wants one. Last time Tegra's only notable design win was the Zune HD, a largely forgettable media player that...well, everyone largely forgot about shortly after its release. But that was all it had. Earlier at the start of this blog I had gushed at the possibilities of its use in smartbooks, only to be disappointed at the close of the year by the absence of said smartbooks. Turns out Mobinnova (and others) was simply waiting for Tegra 2, and for good reason. Packing two out-of-order dual-issue FPU-enabled ARM Cortex A9s, it beats the shit out of Tegra 1. Every demo of a tablet (I guess some are calling those "slate PCs" now) or smartbook using Tegra showed a sluggish running system. The thing was simply not meant for full-sized computing endeavours, and let's face it, we're not even talking full-sized demands here. But Tegra 2 should have no problem handling any Firefox-browsing aspirations, and hell even some HD media and gaming on the side. Cooler still, it's built on 40nm. Usually side products like this--chipsets, bridge chips, NVIO, whatever else NVIDIA makes that's not a GPU--get second class manufacturing, but not this time. I guess it's a sign NVIDIA's really taking this seriously, and if worst comes to worst, I think they're banking on supporting themselves on this little "side product" if at all possible. Apparently they see the mobile SoC market as being worth billions, overshadowing any other market they've ever been in, so it could very well be the next big thing for them. Well, the only other big thing for them aside from GPUs. For now let's hope Tegra 2 makes it into some kickass products that we can actually buy.