One notable advantage of having big customers like Hewlett-Packard pre-announce at Consumer Electronics Show is that big media outlets like The Wall Street Journal treat the smartbook category with more respect. Pundits were praising HP, Lenovo, Mobinnova, ARM processors, and even the 1.5-GHz Snapdragon to the rafters, which means ARM-based mini-systems are bound to be as picked over by analysts and bloggers in 2010 as netbooks. But that good news holds a downside, as exemplified by AT&T’s newfound interest in Mobinnova (whose platform will be analyzed by Gordon Kelly later).
The key to my concern lies in those three letters – A, T, T. This is the wireless operator telling iPhone users to back off on the bandwidth, because it wasn’t prepared to catch up on basestation architectures to meet customer demand (thankfully, Fake Steve Jobs blog ripped apart AT&T, in a hilarious interview, comparing its infrastructure attitude with Capitol Records’ decision in 1964 to build new pressing plants to meet customer demand for Meet The Beatles). This is also the same AT&T that told the FCC recently that it is worried about the wireline side of its business becoming a death spiral.
Well, if you’ve watched the “Island of Misfit Toys” commercial Verizon aired over Christmas, you know that a Verizon can come to the rescue. The same Verizon that introduced new Palm Pre and Pixi Plus phones for its network, but told a CES audience that scaling to Long-Term Evolution networks will take a good two years (and its demonstration room for LTE pointedly did not show handset or smartbook client devices, only large wireless clients). The same Verizon that won’t be able to join in the Google Nexus One game until the current GSM interface is upgraded to CDMA.
T-Mobile? It may be more aggressive in bandwidth rollout, but its coverage in North America has a long way to go. Sprint? It was early with WiMax, but WiMax as an access-point technology is not truly 4G in the sense that LTE Advanced is. And Sprint is now dependent on its partner Clearwire for Wi-Max rollout. The company’s only advantage is offering a unique WiMax router called Overdrive that may ease users’ access tasks.
In short, we have a slew of new smartbooks, netbooks, and smartphones capable of video and advanced packet services, and wireless operators that want to offer smartbooks and netbooks directly, in the same way they offer smartphones. The operators had better get cracking to upgrade those networks, or we’ll find by the summer of 2010 they have large inventories of smartbooks, even as they are singing to users “Get off my cloud!”
Loring
