The ugly ducklings of yesterday are all buttoned up and ready to take on the desktops. We take a look at the range and features on offer.
Time to take another look at the notebooks and its not exactly the budget and the price cuts that should prompt you to consider them. The big news here are the gigantic advances in technology. The notebook today is nothing like its ancestor a year and a half ago. It is sleek, powerful, stuffed with upwards of eight megabytes of RAM (random access memory) and around a gigabyte of storage and crammed with almost every feature a desktop can possess.
Around a year and half ago, a laptop meant only one thing: Snob value. Its purpose was more decorative than functional it packed one-third the features on a desktop and was priced at a premium. Remember those old Compaq Aeros with their slow processors and slow-drawing mono LCD screens?
Since then, however, performance has improved, batteries have graduated from nickel cadmium and nickel hydride to lithium ion, and models are a blast with microphones, speakers and six-speed CD-ROM drives.
The market also saw some changes with Pentium-based models dominating portable computer shipments in 1996-97. They replaced the 486s which dominated shipments in 1995-96.
However, say distributors, 486 notebooks are still in demand. HCL Frontline has nearly exhausted all its stocks of Toshiba 486 notebooks (T 2130CT, T 2130CS, T2150CDT), and Tangerine which recently held a sale in Mumbai says the response to laptops running on chips before the Pentium was quite good. Even those Compaq Aeros were gobbled up within an hour!
A 486-based notebook can be bought for less than a lakh today while Pentium models range from a little over one lakh and to three lakhs and more with accessories. Price is the biggest deterrent to growth of laptop sales in India, agrees Anil Philip, product manager, IBM ThinkPad. (Travelling salesmen and executives are supposed to be ideal target for notebooks but Indian salesmen with expensive notebooks? Somebody try to convince their companies of the logic!) The Indian market for notebooks is a minuscule 17,482 units as compared to world figures which stand at 12.02 million units for 1996-97. Poor demand is also one reason why there are no local manufacturers in this segment. The grey market, which is perceived as the biggest threat to branded desktops, is nonexistent because of the high level of technical expertise involved in manufacturing notebooks.
But despite low volumes, 1996 saw some aggressive advertising by IBM ThinkPad (25 per cent) and the brand increased its market share by an impressive 11 per cent. It also stole the number one slot from rival Compaq whose market share stands three per cent below ThinkPad at 22 per cent. Sales of Wipro Acer are reported to have fallen substantially as compared to 1995-96. Gaurav Chadha said Wipro Acer was the largest seller of notebooks in India in 1995-96.
International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that the portables market in India will grow at CAGR of 25.2 per cent by unit shipments and 23.2 per cent by value. Worldwide, it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.3 per cent to touch 24.17 million units by 2000.
By then, there will be more MMX notebooks, passive matrix screens would have all but disappeared, and notebooks themselves will pack better and superior features in the same space. Pentium-based laptops will eventually be replaced as the largest selling models by MMX-based machines in the short term, and by the Pentium Pro (with or without the MMX), as its heat emission levels come down. Prices will drop only marginally, though products will get better and growth cycles shorter.
In the immediate future, however, the Pentium Pro will not appear on notebooks. The Pentium Pro generates a lot a heat, making it absolutely impossible to use it in portables, assert vendors. A standard Pentium Pro generates more than 20 Watts of power, making heat dissipation and battery life a nightmare. It will have to come down to around 8 Watts before it becomes feasible to put it in a laptop, says Vikas Arora.
According to IDC, the top five vendors IBM, Compaq, Wipro Acer, Toshiba and Apple account for more 70 per cent of the total portable shipments in India. Heres a brief look at the new features the better specified ones offer.
Weight
Unlike a desktop, a laptop has to move around a lot. So make sure it doesnt weigh like lead. The best buy, if you go by weight, is the ultra-thin ThinkPad 560. Barely an inch thick, it weighs 1.86 Kgs and opens up to reveal a 12.1 inch active matrix screen and a full-size keyboard. The system is powered by a pentium 133 MHz processor and runs on a Li-Ion battery. But like most thin-and-wide notebooks, the biggest trade-off is the lack of internal drive options, explains Vikas Arora of Tangerine. The ThinkPad 560 does not have an internal CD-ROM drive, although it comes with an external detachable floppy drive. It has a hard disk capacity of 1.08 GB. (Estimated street price: Rs 1,99,000)
Caution: If you have to install new software along the way and swap files with your desktop PC quite a lot, this PC may not be such a good idea.
Battery Life
Another equally important feature. Nobody wants their laptop to fold up on them some 20,000 feet above the ground. Lithium ion batteries last for two to three hours as opposed to the earlier NiMH batteries which last for little more than an hour. However, they are three times as expensive which is why most entry-level notebooks like the Compaq Armada 1120T still ship with NiMH batteries.
Apart from the type of battery the notebook supports, battery-life is also determined by a number of other factors like power management, screen brightness and other features. The newest model from Wipro Acer, Nuovo, promises to increase battery life to around seven hours using a proprietary power management algorithm called heuristic power management. The technology is integrated into the motherboard and enables intelligent power-conservation without the users intervention, says Chadha of Wipro.
The Wipro AcerNote 970 Nuovo series consists of two models: One with a 11.3 inch passive matrix display and the other with a 12.1 inch active matrix display. Both are multimedia machines powered by Pentium 150 MHz processors. They come with a six-speed CD-ROM drive which can be swapped for a floppy drive, and a 1.3 Kgs docking station which has a built-in 10 Base-T ethernet with RJ-45 port for easy network connectivity. The notebook weighs 3.5 kgs with CD drive and battery. (List price: Rs 2,64,000 and Rs 3,11,000)
Another model which offers improved battery performance is the Dell Latitude XPiP133ST. The power management software on the notebook allows users to choose between various energy saving modes like LCD sleep mode, stand-by mode, suspend mode and customise the time settings for each according to his requirements. As the name suggests, it comes with a 133 MHz, 11.3 inch active matrix screen and a floppy drive. (Estimated street price : Rs 1,75,000).
Caution: With or without power management features, always check the battery level before setting off. Rule of thumb: If the manufacture says three hours of battery life, count on two.
Display
The next most important criteria in a laptop is the display. Most brands offer a choice of 11.3 inch passive matrix (DSTN) and 12.1 inch active matrix (TFT) displays for the same configuration. Opting for a active matrix will get you richer colours and wide viewing angles but make you poorer by around Rs 30,000. Passive matrix panels today are much better than the washed-out ones that used to ship earlier, but still active matrix screens score. Here, your budget is the only limiting factor.
Among the few models which ship with screen sizes smaller than 11 inches are the Compaq Armada 1120T and the Wipro AcerNote 350PC. The Armada 1120T comes with a 10.4 inch active matrix display, a Pentium processor and NiMH batteries. The major drawback in this model is the lack of audio cache and a secondary cache. However, it offers a reliable solution for non-demanding portable applications. (Estimated street price: Rs 1,26,600). The Wipro AcerNote 350 PC supports a 10.4 inch DSTN, 16-bit stereo and NiMH batteries. Its weight is approximately the same as the Armada 1120T at 2.65 kgs. (List price: Rs 1,11,800)
Caution: The bigger the screen the better. Also, check for a better viewing angle and less reflectivity. And dont expect desktop quality displays. Even with oodles of Video RAM, screen re-draws are still a crawl.
Multimedia
For full-fledged multimedia notebooks theres nothing to beat the two Toshiba models introduced in India in March this year. Tecra 730 XCDT and Tecra 740 CDT run on MMX chips, designed by Intel exclusively for multimedia applications. (See bs.connect dated for more on the MMX chip). Both models come with ten-speed CD-ROM drives, whopping 2.02 GB hard disks, 16 MB RAM and 2 MB VRAM. The Tecra 730 XCDT supports a 12.1 inch active matrix display and runs on a 150 MHz processor (List price: Rs 3,37,000), while the Tecra CDT a 13.3 inch active matrix and 166 MHz processor (List price: Rs 3,94,000). They also feature in-built power supplies.
IBM is also expected to introduce ThinkPads running on the MMX processor by May, according to Anil Philip, product manager. The models will ship with 3 GB hard disk and XGA active matrix displays like the Toshiba. They will be priced over Rs 3,30,000.
Caution: Here, talk MMX. And be prepared to pay a packet. If thats too much, find out about the performance of the graphics card and the amount of video memory offered as standard.
Apple offerings
For the die-hard Apple fans, last December, the company introduced two new PowerBooks in India. Unlike the earlier models, both 1400cs/117 and 1400c/133 feature removable modular CD-ROM drives. The drive is a standard on the PowerBook 1400c/133 (List price: Rs 2,5,000 lakhs) which comes with a 11.3 inch active matrix display; and optional on the 1400cs/117 (List price: Rs 1,70,000) which comes with a passive matrix display. Based on the PowerPC 603e processor, the PowerBooks come with Apples characteristic ease of use. But before making your PowerBook purchase remember the choice of software on the Macintosh platform is limited when compared to what is available on the Wintel platform today.
Note: If you swap software with colleagues, an Apple may not be such a good idea. Or if you work on a PC network at home. On the other hand, if you are a designer who works at the office on PowerMacs, you would be willing to sacrifice a bit of compatibility.
All figures relating to the market sourced from IDC. Prices from IBM, Wipro Infotech, Tangerine Informatique Limited, Allied
Digital Services, HCL Frontline.
