Fully featured mobile computing lingers on the horizon like a mirage despite burgeoning bandwidth and connectivity creeping toward every corner. So when will Ulta Mobile PCs take off? Yankee Group's Steve Hilton looks to Star Trek for answers in this month's Ask Steve.
Each month, SMB expert Steve Hilton of Yankee Group answers real reader questions about small and midsize business.
I know one or two Ask Steve readers are Trekkies. Star Trek is a wonderful vehicle for stirring up controversy among executives about vertical-specific applications, mobile devices, unified communications, and next-generation technology 10 to 30 years in the future. This month, I'm joined by Yankee Group's premier device analyst John Jackson. Together, we aim our photon torpedoes at ultra-mobile PCs in this installment of Ask Steve.
Matt from Indianapolis, Ind., asks: Have you heard of any successful or unsuccessful UMPC implementations for field service or field sales teams? Other than Intermec and Symbol/Motorola, are hardware providers really coming to play in this market?
Steve: Matt, the short answer, is no and no. That said, let's start by defining ultra-mobile personal computers (UMPC). UMPCs are small form-factor, mobile-centric, voice and data devices -- imagine a large smartphone (or a small tablet PC) with a 6-inch or 7-inch screen with cellular connectivity. Smartphone manufacturers (Nokia, Samsung, etc.) have done much of development work in this space rather than the laptop/PC manufacturers (Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, HP, etc.).
Right now, the market for UMPCs is a tiny blip on the device radar-screen. In 2007, Yankee Group estimates U.S. workers used 14.1 million smartphones and 37 million laptops; smartphone and laptop growth is expected to be 35% and 15% per year, respectively. By contrast, there were 175,000 UMPCs in 2007 with very little, if any, expected growth.
Source: Yankee Group 2008
What's hampering UMPC growth? Put bluntly, there's no sizeable potential market for UMPC. Let's look to Star Trek. At their primary workstations, the Enterprise crew typically have flat-screen, touch-sensitive panels connected to a centralized computer. When working around the ship, they use tablet-size PCs with a stylus; the form-factor is appropriate for viewing data while working away from a primary workstation and tablets have high computing power. When visiting alien planets, the crew need less applications-intensive computing and generally use smartphone devices or smaller micro devices that have industry-specific solutions embedded (e.g., health care applications, natural sciences applications, etc.).
We believe technology will mimic Star Trek. We'll have more smartphone-sized devices that facilitate remote working, albeit with less overall processing power. And we'll have more powerful tablet-style PCs facilitating a rich applications environment with extensive processing power.
Imagine a half-hearted space battle between Star Trek opponents where the winner doesn't win anything and opponents aren't sure what they're fighting for -- an apt analogy for the current UMPC industry. Chip vendors, device vendors, OS vendors, applications developers all unenthusiastically battling for supremacy in a very small, no-growth market. Sound like a bad space trip? It does to us, too.
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In the end, we believe the UMPC space will remain niche with industry-centric solutions. The devices don't have a mass-market potential because the two user requirements (high computing power and mobile/remote empowerment) aren't met with a middle-of-the-road solution. Winners in the mobile-device world are willing to boldly go where no one has gone before -- to a place where the form-factor and functionality strongly fit the end-user requirements in and outside the office (and maybe in deep space one day).
Thanks for the great question, Matt.
Do you have a question to ask Yankee Group analyst Steve Hilton?
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Steve Hilton is VP of Enterprise and SMB research at Yankee Group. Hilton is recognized as a leading, global SMB expert.
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