Monday, Nov. 09, 2009

PCs shed pounds and CD drives, gain touch screens

Personal computers are changing. Visit an electronics store and you might also find laptops are missing a familiar component. You could experiment with new ways of controlling some computers. And you'll see portable PCs slimming down. Here's a look at what the season's computer trends mean for you.

We're over drives: Computers have come with "optical drives," slots for CDs or DVDs, for years. They've been useful for installing new software, watching movies or transferring music libraries into digital form. But one of the biggest lessons from the craze for "netbooks" - inexpensive little laptops designed mainly for browsing the Web - is that people were so excited about the small, easy-to-carry size that they didn't miss having a CD or DVD drive.

Taking out the optical drive doesn't significantly lower prices. Doing so does let PC makers design much thinner laptops.

You just might want to think twice if you're hooked on transferring CDs into MP3s - or if you spend a lot of time watching DVDs on airplanes and don't want to squint at your iPod screen or get a portable video player.

Good enough is plenty: It might sound impressive when a PC sales pitch mentions multicore processors, state-of-the-art graphics chips, 4 or 6 or 8 gigabytes of memory and hard drives with a terabyte - 1,000 gigabytes - of storage. But another thing netbooks showed is that with a few exceptions - such as professional video editing, and maybe hard-core video-game playing - having lots of PC power is overkill.

There's very little software that can take advantage of these powerful computers, says technology analyst Rob Enderle. That means there's no "killer app," the program that's so cool or so useful it persuades everyday PC users to trade up.

While the microprocessors that act as the brains inside netbooks are less powerful than even those found in inexpensive full-sized laptops, they are sufficient for most Web browsing, e-mailing and word processing. And these computers are getting bigger hard drives, which you need for storing digital photos, music and video. Overall, they're good enough that to people replacing 3- and 4-year-old PCs, netbooks feel downright fast.

Everything's getting carried away: People want Internet access all the time, and PC makers are betting "smart" phones - even the iPhone - aren't big or ergonomic enough for anything more complex or time-consuming than a quick e-mail reply.

But already the line between phones and PCs is blurring: PC makers are teaming with mobile carriers to sell netbooks that cost as little as $99 as long as the buyer subscribes to a wireless data service. A new buzzword, "smartbooks," is emerging to describe a device that runs a smart-phone operating system such as Google Inc.'s Android but on bigger hardware that is more like a PC than a phone.

To get you to carry their laptops to the corner coffee shop, PC companies are treating their wares as fashion accessories, not just tools. You'll see more colors and patterns, more design-conscious shapes and upscale materials.

The next frontier: cutting the cord for longer stretches. New chips that require less energy are emerging, and advances in battery technology are expected in the coming years to extend the time people can sit in the airport watching YouTube.

Get The State newspaper delivered to your home. Click here to subscribe.