ABI Research, the Long Island market-analysis firm that cuts a wide swathe across consumer and enterprise IT, always has favored a three-letter acronym for a handheld widget, similar to the old MID term – Ultra-Mobile Device, or UMD. ABI also often has been first at covering all things Atom, making it even more significant that the company’s latest study predicts ARM-based UMDs will overtake all x86-based UMDs, both Atom and otherwise, by 2013. Furthermore, senior analyst Jeff Orr calls 2010 “pivotal,” a year in which ARM-based UMDs will exceed 20 percent of the market for the first time, and when the momentum will be built for the three years that follow.
Some analysts might argue that CES introductions represented a thin gruel on which to build such momentum, but ABI points out that its predictions include ARM-based netbooks, smartbooks, and tablets – which, as Gordon Kelly pointed out , are often hard to distinguish from their non-touch-sensitive cousins.
We’re further glad that Orr called on wireless operators to be more aggressive at rolling out 4G services like Long-Term Evolution and WiMAX. As we mentioned during CES, current bandwidth bottlenecks involving smartphones are merely a taste of what carriers will run into once the UMDs in all their tablet and smartbook and netbook flavors begin utilizing all that bandwidth for cloud-based applications. It’s good to have ABI out banging the drum on a very important issue.
Loring
